A Sad Day

However things turn out, this is a very sad day. As anyone over forty can attest, GM was the iconic company that would always be here and that produced the cars that young men in particular loved. The car at the left is a 1955 Chevy Bel Air.

Until very recently the globe's largest automotive producer, this company, with more than a century of history, has been mismanaged for more than a generation. It rested on its considerable laurels, and today it is paying the price.

While the company is producing some excellent product now, it is a dollar short and a day late. The writing was on the wall at least from the time of the 1973 OPEC crisis, if not earlier. Yet until quite recently, GM was content to sell high profit dinosaurs epitomized by the Hummer. This was a company that had the talent and the means to do better -- to build smaller, more efficient cars, to not acquiesce to every union demand, to keep adequate reserves for reasonable health care and pension provisions and to be the innovative champion that they were a half century ago.