Sometimes I feel like Obama supporters, me included, expected him to be the next political Babe Ruth, but instead he turns out to be the next Wade Boggs; the greatest singles hitter of all time. I mean this man seems incredibly efficient, but sometimes without imagination and passion.
Take, for instance, GM's recent emergence from bankruptcy. As a bankruptcy attorney I am amazed at the efficiency and effectiveness of the quick exit of GM from it's Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It is clear that the entire bankruptcy was well conceived and perfectly executed. It was a classic bootstrap restructure, where the secured obligations, including the government, were converted to equity, and the unsecured debt, to the tune of about 40 billion, was essentially extinguished. This will fit neatly into a bankruptcy textbook one day.
That is the good news. The bad news is that GM is essentially the same company now that it was when it filed Chapter 11. Not in terms of it's debt structure, which is imminently improved, but in it's technology. There was no "Manhattan Project" for a new propulsion system, no green mandates(all of the talk of a green GM is really nothing more than a marketing piece), nothing risky, challenging or controversial. In fact, the talking heads on Fox News, which find fault in his Harvard Educated diction, had nothing to say. Why, because it was without incident. The Obama administration has simply fixed the broken company.
Maybe I shouldn't complain. For now, 3 million auto related jobs are safe. This is another shelf placed underneath a falling economy. This was a solid single against arguably the best pitcher in baseball (the figurative disaster of an economy and the administrative morass of one of the largest companies in the world), but I was hoping for a big swing, and maybe a home run.
GM pledges 'new beginning' as it exits Chapter 11 - MarketWatch
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