A preliminary Treasury Department estimate indicates that the United States would recover most of its planned $50 billion investment in General Motors (GM) by 2013, when the automaker would reach an equity value of $75 billions, the WaPo reported late Friday.
From WaPo: Among the key variables in any such forecast is the number of new cars sold annually in the United States as well as the estimate of GM’s share of the market.
During the boom years, the annualized figure for car sales in the United States hovered around 16 million. Recently, it has fallen to between 9 million and 10 million on an annualized basis.
In regulatory filings, GM has estimated that the car market will rebound to 16 million by 2012.
Those filings also assume the GM market share will slump slightly between now and 2012, to 18.4 percent from 19.5 percent….
Perhaps satisfying a $50 billion debt within five years is unrealistically optimistic. So far, the government has injected $20 billion to help the ailing automaker sustain its day-to-day operations. GM, a company that has been in business for 100 years and has produced nearly 450 million vehicles globally, has projected that the auto-industry will recover moderately to 14.5 million units by fiscal 2011. This is significantly below the 17 million unit industry levels averaged over the last nine years. Let’s hope the taxpayers are not left holding the bag for the mistakes of GM’s management over the last four decades.
Since we’re talking cars ; the following video is rather interesting. It shows a technology that has the capability of revolutionizing the world by removing oil/gas as main sources of fuel. The car runs on water.
