The AutoAlliance plant at Flat Rock, Michigan, a Ford/Mazda joint venture, will eliminate an overnight shift beginning in July, idling 950 workers. The plant builds the Ford Mustang and the Mazda6.

I paid attention to this because two cars I’ve owned came from this plant: the second of them, a 2000 Mazda 626, was the least-troublesome car I’ve ever had, and I’d still have it today were it not for some damn deer in Coal County. And yes, it’s a UAW plant.

(Seen at Interested-Participant.)

The Tulsa World reports:

For more than a year, Arrow Trucking Co. has faced financial problems that include bills going unpaid and vendors and contractors filing lawsuits totaling almost half a million dollars against the company, records show.

Now Arrow Trucking, a 61-year-old Tulsa-based flatbed carrier, has suspended operations indefinitely, laying off employees and stranding scores of drivers around the country.

Jeffro could have seen it coming:

Arrow has a pretty bad reputation — a simple web search will find a lot of bad info on forums and the like. It’s one thing to go belly up, but to strand their drivers just before Christmas? Arrow actually dispatched drivers with loads knowing they were going to shut their doors and kill their fuel cards. Their management has known of this for quite some time, so one can only infer what sort of benefits they received by keeping this quiet until the last second. I’m quite sure “they got theirs” out before the walls came crashing down.

Apparently they were considered at least somewhat solvent early last year, when they financed (through Freightliner) a plan to replace their entire fleet over five years. Still, a lot can happen in a very short time.

How … hard … are they?

Times are so hard that when I went to the supermarket I was able to find package after package of chicken feet and claws, but not a single package of boneless chicken breasts.

With people hard up more and more of the cheaper cuts are being carried in larger and larger quantities, anything to stretch a dollar.

Of course part of it is the change in demographics, as little as 5-7 years ago it would have been almost impossible to find chicken feet and claws in this neck of the woods outside a specialty store.

I won’t ask him how the pork knuckles are moving.

Incidentally, I snagged an eight-piece box of fried chicken from the deli section of the supermarket Saturday, which is normally two each of the canonical four parts. A second drumstick, however, was not to be had at any price. (They gave me a third thigh instead. Googlewhack that, wisenheimers.)

“How much do you want for the puppy?”

The child thought for a moment, then briefly channeled Dr. Evil. “One million dollars.”

A frown, and then: “How about two kittens at $500,000 each?”

And so a deal was made in the neighborhood, and everyone was happy.

It’s going to take something like that for the taxpayers to recoup their quite-involuntary investment in the American auto industry. From a new GAO report [pdf], we find this little jewel:

Equity value of company necessary to recoup investment:
Chrysler: $54.8 [billion]
GM: $66.9 [billion]

By comparison, Ford, an automaker not owned by the government, which is for the moment marginally profitable, has a market capitalization around $24 billion. How in the world is Chrysler, maybe half the size of Ford in a good year, ever going to be worth $55 billion? Somebody’s going to need an awful lot of high-priced cats.

We remember the Great Oil Bust of the early 80s. A lot of cars sported a bumper sticker like this: PLEASE, GOD, JUST ONE MORE BOOM / I PROMISE NOT TO PISS IT AWAY THIS TIME. Oklahoma City is not exactly the World’s Boomtown at the moment, but we’re doing pretty well compared to some parts of the country, some of which have been hurting for all the years between then and now. A Twitter friend wrote this up:

I work as a reference librarian at a public library in Lorain, Ohio, located about 30 minutes due west from Cleveland. Lorain is a smaller version of the Rust Belt cities you’ve all heard about: Cleveland, Youngstown, Buffalo, Toledo, Detroit. Lorain once made ships — George Steinbrenner of Yankees fame (or infamy) owned the local shipyard — cars (Fords), and the steel that went into them. Lorain no longer makes cars or ships things. One of the two steel mills is on “warm idle” (mill lingo for the cooling of the blast furnace used for making bar steel), which means that about two-thirds of its 1,000 employees are on indefinite layoff.

The recession of the early 1980s hit here hard and really never went away. The official county unemployment rate hovers around 10 percent and foreclosures are a huge problem as elsewhere in Ohio.

And so it was that the library became more than just the local book depository:

[M]y library held a “recession resources fair” to help people find out how they could perhaps better “survive” in the current economy.

If someone approached my table, I greeted them and explained what the library could offer — books on all aspects of the career search and job hunting process, computer access. I gave them handouts on resume help and offered my business card. If they seemed interested in that assistance, I then walked that person to the state employment agency table and introduced them to the counselor at that table, where they would then be told about what that agency could do for them — job training, classes on interview skills and resume writing, referrals to GED and English language classes and more computers for job searching.

Which, if you think about it, is not so far removed from what libraries usually do:

It was a concentrated version of what librarians do every day — tell people about what we have and where else they might go for more help. But this time, the additional sources of help weren’t a phone call away, but were maybe waiting for them inside a public library meeting room. I will likely never find out if anyone in that room received information or assistance that will make any kind of real difference in their lives. All any of us there could do was to try and help.

Incidentally, tomorrow (3 November) several Ohio libraries will have bond and levy issues on local ballots: since most of the Buckeye State’s libraries are funded by the state, and Columbus is broke, a lot of libraries face major cutbacks or worse. I’m not from around there, but I’ve made friends up thataway, and I’d hate to see this sort of thing happen to them.

(For comparison purposes, libraries in Oklahoma County get a levy through the local property tax, about which more anon.)

Addendum: “Man, nobody moves to Youngstown.” Oh, yeah?

Pew’s Subsidyscope.com has a neat interactive map of Amtrak routes and how much money they lost in 2008, as most of them did.

The single most profitable Amtrak route is the highly-traveled Acela Express, which pulled in $486 million in fares, earning about $64 per passenger before allowing for depreciation and other expenses Amtrak thinks should not be part of the calculation. All the really long-distance routes dropped a bundle, the worst being the New Orleans-to-Los Angeles Sunset Limited, which managed to lose $31 million on $9 million in revenue.

As for the Heartland Flyer, it’s officially just about breaking even: revenue of $5.7 million, expenses of $5.9 million. (The Flyer, incidentally, has about 10 percent more passengers than the Sunset.)

And this may or may not speak for itself:

In August 2009, the Congressional Budget Office considered the option of reducing Amtrak’s federal subsidy by about $200 million a year for five years. Amtrak officials and passenger rail advocates say this is impractical, noting that no passenger rail service in the world is profitable and arguing that Amtrak would cease to exist without the federal money.

Not one? Anywhere?

Stan Geiger has no problem with the Federal Pay Czar:

I like the idea of the federal government limiting compensation for executives of companies that have taken tax money. If nothing else, such a move fires a round across the bow of any executive in this country that thinks he or she can drive a company into the ground, get bailed out with gubment money, and still grab off those personal millions. Screw ‘em.

Of course, the “brain drain” argument shows up. Why, if these geniuses don’t get paid their millions upon millions, they’ll go to work somewhere else. Fine, let them quit. Let them go to work delivering pizzas. That’s where they belong.

Not so fast, Stan. If, for instance, Bank of America execs were delivering pizzas, this is what you could expect:

• Arbitrary change of toppings
• Annual fee for living on the delivery route
• A baleful look if you question the recommended 29.9 percent tip

It’s gotta be the coal mine for these guys.

I mentioned the foreclosure of Crossroads Mall way back in the spring, but didn’t go into the gory details: I merely predicted the arrival of the bulldozers. Then this story cropped up this week (hat tip: McGehee), and suddenly it was news again:

Crossroads Mall, half-empty after anchor stores Macy’s, JC Penney, Montgomery Ward and Dillard’s all pulled out, was brought out of foreclosure in April with $77 million in debt, according to Ann Marie Randolph at the Oklahoma County Sheriff’s office. It is now up for sale for $24 million.

Montgomery Ward, you’ll remember, died way back in 2001, so this situation has been brewing for a long time. JCPenney has regrouped, with new stores to the south and east, but neither Macy’s nor Dillard’s has sought a new location.

And you care about this dead mall, because you own it:

The Fed’s $29 billion bailout of Bear Stearns was secured by a portfolio of Bear assets that included $5.5 billion in commercial loans, including the note on Crossroads Mall that went into default.

In case you want the dots connected, the Oklahoman’s Richard Mize has done the drawing for you:

Price Edwards is listing the mall for mall owner Maiden Lane LLC, an entity of Maiden Lane Commercial Mortgage Backed Securities Trust. It wound up with the mall after Arkansas-based Midwest Mall Properties LLC lost it to foreclosure late last year.

Maiden Lane is a “special purpose vehicle” created in April 2008 by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to facilitate the merger of Bear Stearns Cos. Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Maiden Lane owns Crossroads Mall because former owner Macerich Co. refinanced $61.2 million with Bear Stearns in 2006. But since Maiden Lane is a creature of the Federal Reserve, it was the Fed that took title when Maiden Lane paid $11.24 million for the property at a sheriff’s sale April 30.

I still think: bulldozers. Except for right around that oil well on the premises.

Actually, I have no idea what Roger Ebert, the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times, thinks about these arcane money manipulations, but he’s a good place to hang a metaphor:

Suppose Congress codified it into law that movie theaters could charge twice as much for any movie that Roger Ebert gave “three stars” or higher. In other words, Roger Ebert — the movie critic — is specifically mentioned in the bill, and given a sort of official, government-approved fiscal power to help determine movie-ticket prices by the sheer force of his proclamations.

First off: wouldn’t that be freaking ridiculous? Yet that’s what we have done with The Rating Agencies. Their proclamation that a security is “AAA”, for example, affects the legal capital requirements needed to be held against it. This fact alone is pretty much the only reason that “CDOs” even exist.

How would this work in real life? Here’s the release schedule from Metro-Goldman-Sachs:

Okay, so if the movie gets 2.5 stars or lower, you can charge $10; 3 stars or above, you can charge $20. Now along comes some enterprising theater owner who takes Transporter 2 (2.5 stars), splices a half hour of Schindler’s List (4 stars) onto the end of it, and calls the resulting 2-hour film a 3-star “movie” (on average). Now he can charge $20 per 2-hour bloc instead of only $10 for every 1.5-hour bloc, which is a nice improvement from his point of view.

This begins to happen more and more. Movies are spliced and diced just to get above the Ebert Threshold. Four-star movies are cut off by 25% and called three-star movies for the same price (to watch the last 25% you have to buy another ticket). Finally, movie studios start getting in bed with Ebert and sending him kickbacks, leading to Star inflation. People complain about all this. “This is absurd!” they say. And it is.

I don’t think Ebert is at all bribable in this way, but then his reputation is so colossal, comparatively speaking, that he isn’t likely to risk it for some short-term gain. Your Rating Services? Not so much.

Now, the interesting question is why it’s absurd. I’m not sure there’s a right answer and there seem to be two general schools of thought:

1. It’s absurd because Roger Ebert shouldn’t be allowed to just give four stars to any movie. Or to get kickbacks from movie studios. Generally, there needs to be better and stricter oversight of Roger Ebert. He should be called before a Congressional subcommittee. Meanwhile, there should be tighter controls, and more complicated mathematical formulas, regarding how a “three-star-on-average movie” can be created. Not just any movie can be sliced and diced like that. Some independent body should do some stress-testing of their own, perhaps, hiring the best PhD statisticians to build models of Movie Quality. Maybe the theater owner should be required to fill out more forms, pay some fees, take some licensing exams, etc. An independent regulatory body, with Presidential appointees ratified by Cognress, could be set up to oversee all this.

2. It was just absurd to give Roger Ebert’s movie reviews the force of law in the first place.

My sentiments are definitely with #2: the whole process by which these particular derivatives were, um, derived deserves Thumbs Down.

Not to be confused with Plan 9 from Outer Space, this is the proposal by the City of Tough Brotherly Love if some budget relief from Harrisburg isn’t forthcoming.

What does Plan C do?

Anticipating yet another week of uncertainty in Harrisburg, Mayor [Michael] Nutter yesterday held a two-hour open meeting with more than 30 top city officials who outlined the impact, department by department, of a contingency budget that the administration continues to work on.

That budget, known as Plan C, would reduce spending by that same $700 million over the next five years by, among other measures, closing every library and recreation center and eliminating 3,000 city jobs, including nearly 1,000 in the Police Department.

There was disagreement at the meeting over whether the actions would be temporary or permanent.

Either way, said Mayor Nutter, “I think the people of Philadelphia are increasingly getting pissed off about this entire situation.”

Meanwhile, the Free Library of Philadelphia has posted its closing notice:

We deeply regret to inform you that without the necessary budgetary legislation by the State Legislature in Harrisburg, the City of Philadelphia will not have the funds to operate our neighborhood branch libraries, regional libraries, or the Parkway Central Library after October 2, 2009.

Specifically, the following will take effect after the close of business, October 2, 2009:

• All branch and regional library programs, including programs for children and teens, after school programs, computer classes, and programs for adults, will be cancelled.
• All Parkway Central Library programs, including children programs, programs to support small businesses and job seekers, computer classes and after school programs, will be cancelled. We are exploring the possibility of relocating the Philadelphia Author Series programs to other non-library facilities.
• All library visits to schools, day care centers, senior centers and other community centers will cease.
• All community meetings at our branch and regional libraries, and the Parkway Central Library, will be cancelled.
• All GED, ABE and ESL programs held at Free Library branches will be discontinued, students should contact their teacher to see if other arrangements are being made.

In addition, all library materials will be due on October 1, 2009. This will result in a diminishing borrowing period for books and other library materials, beginning September 11, 2009. No library materials will be able to be borrowed after September 30, 2009.

No wonder they’re pissed off.

Meanwhile, Governor Ed Wood Rendell says he’s not happy with a proposed budget deal:

“They made their numbers work on paper, but the numbers won’t work in the real world,” Gov. Ed Rendell said today of the budget agreement reached Friday by Senate Republicans and House Democrats.

Rendell said he will not sign the budget compromise if it reaches his desk.

“Future events such as these,” warned Criswell, “will affect you in the future.”

(Via Marc Parent.)

Come the first of October, the Federal Housing Administration, which has taken some serious losses in the condominium market, will be operating under a new set of lending rules which will likely prove worrisome to developers in the nation’s downtowns. For instance:

All development not considered primarily residential are out. For instance, a development with more than 25% of the total floor area dedicated to commercial business use is out.

There goes your mixed-use development. And if that didn’t do the trick, this one will:

Noise issues is a new concern, so any development within 1,000 feet of a highway, freeway, or heavily travelled road, 3,000 feet of a railroad, 1 mile of an airport, or 5 miles of a military airfield will become ineligible for approval.

Cashing in on the presence of that new light-rail line? Not gonna happen. You’ve got to be more than half a mile away.

None of this would matter quite so much if the FHA were participating in the market at its historical level, about two or three percent. But now it’s over twenty percent.

(Via Chris Bradford.)

(Source.)

A Daily Pundit commenter encapsulates the entire Cash for Clunkers experience:

I’m in the process of getting a new company car, and had a discussion with the local Ford dealership management.

The biggest disconnect between the ‘clunkers’ program and the reality of the effort is that ‘clunkers’ were never the target — SUVs are.

Jeep Cherokee, Ford Escape, Chevy Blazer, and a wide variety of mid 90s minivans are piling up in scrap yards from this program.

Truly POS cars that spew burning oil but get decent mileage don’t qualify because the interest in getting them off the street is minimal. It’s all about the evil SUVs.

Of course, the fact that most of those SUVs were turned in for new, higher mileage SUVs — especially those offered by non-government motors brands Ford, Toyota, and Nissan — highlights the wisdom of the average American.

At least twice a week I find myself at an intersection behind some late 80s/early-to-middle 90s automotive excrescence — foreign, domestic, doesn’t matter — and I have to lunge for the Recirc button to keep that POS’s roiling plume of pure pollution out of my car’s ventilation system. Of the last four such I’ve encountered, only one would have been legally Clunkable, though all of them should be forced off the road as a matter of environmental protection. (Another disconnect: all life on earth is allegedly threatened by carbon dioxide — your friendly neighborhood tree will disagree — but this Pennzoil-roasting-on-an-open-fire stuff, which you can see for half a block, is overlooked by the True Believers.)

Got to hand it to the Democrats, who can have every tool of power at their disposal and still create a craptacular waste of money that proves another of their theories — that everybody would buy a compact if they were given the right incentive — doesn’t hold up when confronted by reality.

I suspect here that the operative word is “tool,” in multiple definitions yet.

What’s next, LaSalle? Oldsmobile dealers are feeling the squeeze:

In all, GM paid dealers more than $1 billion when it eliminated the 103-year-old brand [in 2000] because of dwindling sales. Some of the 2,800 Oldsmobile dealers took lump-sum payouts, which were based mainly on sales volume. Others agreed to annual cash payments for as long as 10 years.

Several dealers just learned they won’t be receiving the rest of their money because the automaker is leaving those payments in bankruptcy court with the “old GM,” according to a recent bankruptcy court filing. They’ll likely get pennies on the dollar for their claims, which vary, but ranged from $50,000 to $4 million.

The last Oldsmobile was built in April 2004.

(Via The Truth About Cars.)

I suspect that this is not going to be the next Google:

The General Motors Company, the new automaker majority-owned by the United States Treasury, said Friday that it intended to make an initial public offering of stock by July 10, 2010, the one-year anniversary of its exit from bankruptcy. The target date range for an offering was disclosed Friday in a federal regulatory filing that the company said summarized its activities in the four weeks since it left court protection.

I’m trying to decide whether to question the timing. There’s no reason to think the General will be in much better shape this time next summer; on the other hand, if nothing goes wrong(er) and the stars line up correctly, we’re looking at about four months before the hotly-hyped 2011 Chevrolet Volt is supposed to go on sale. If the Volt proves to be the game-changer GM swears it will be, the folks who bought in for a pittance in July will turn a tidy profit in December or January.

Meanwhile, No Longer Second Deputy Under-Assistant Car Czar Ron Bloom says Chrysler won’t be doing likewise for a while:

“I don’t think Chrysler’s I.P.O. is a 2010 event,” Mr. Bloom told reporters at an automotive conference in northern Michigan. “I think it’s a little further off. But again, that will be the board’s judgment.”

Mr. Bloom referred to Mr. Obama’s directive that the government sell its stakes in the carmakers “as soon as is practicable.” He stressed, though, that unloading the 61 percent share of G.M. and 8 percent share of Chrysler would take time so as not to destroy their value.

On the other hand, an IPO would be a pretty good indication of whether those shares have any value in the first place.

(Via The Truth About Cars.)

Second Deputy Under-Assistant Car Czar Ron Bloom let it be known yesterday that the car companies the government controls are once again responsible for their own warranty coverage:

Toward the beginning of the restructuring process, the Auto Task Force implemented a Warranty Program to give confidence to GM’s and Chrysler’s customers during a period of substantial uncertainty regarding the outlook for the companies. With the successful emergence of the new companies, consumers can now feel assured that the companies have the financial wherewithal to meet their warranty commitments on a continuing basis. As such, the Auto Task Force determined that it was appropriate to end the Warranty Program. I am happy to report that $641 million invested in the program has been returned to United States Government along with interest payments on the program. This achievement represented a prudent short-term use of taxpayer funds.

Of course, $641 million compared with the untold billions poured into these particular ratholes corporations — well, let’s see if the bank will take $2.69 toward my mortgage payment next month.

Still, we should hope Mr Bloom’s confidence is not misplaced, if only because it would be nice to get some sort of return on, um, investment.

(Via The Truth About Cars.)

The cash-strapped New York Times Company’s last remaining broadcast property, radio station WQXR in New York, will be sold, in pieces.

Two of them, precisely. NYT will swap the license for WQXR (96.3 MHz, 6000 watts) for the license for Univision’s WCAA (105.9 MHz, 610 watts); Univision will pay $33.5 million to NYT. And public broadcaster WNYC will acquire WQXR’s studio facilities, intellectual property, and the 105.9 license for $11.5 million.

This is not the first time a classical-music station has been shunted off to a poorer dial position in exchange for cash. I said back in 2003:

The historical record shows many instances where a classical station relocated to an inferior facility in exchange for lots of money; the best-known, perhaps, was the move of Cleveland’s WCLV to a 6-kw channel in exurban Lorain. It was argued at the time that the move would help secure the station’s then-uncertain future, and maybe it did, but I’d hate to have to try to tune them in from the parking lot at Severance Hall.

Next time I was in Cleveland, I tuned in to WCLV to see how well it reached the city’s east side. The answer: not very. WQXR’s tower isn’t moving — it will remain on the Empire State Building — but cutting its power output will definitely reduce its availability to fringe-area listeners.

(Via Doc Searls.)

(By Lisa Benson, Washington Post Writers Group.)

One possible obstacle to the restoration of General Motors, apart from its lack of solid product lines, its myopic upper management, and its beyond-myopic upper-upper management in Washington, is its name: it’s just too twentieth-century, maybe even nineteenth-century, and doesn’t speak to contemporary buyers.

So how about GenMo?

A shortening of the current name, tailored for today’s shorter attention spans. Preserves the equity of decades’ worth of branding, while making it that much easier for disgruntled customers / employees / creditors to spit out as a curse.

Hey, it worked for FedEx.

I note that Japan’s most successful automakers, Toyota and Honda, are named after their founders. (Toyota messed with the spelling a little bit, but no one complained, nor did anyone gripe at Mazda either.) Perhaps GM should be renamed for Billy Durant. And given its current state, it should be Durant’s middle name.

As I’ve noted several times, I am not interested in selling the palatial estate at Surlywood. However, I do try to pay attention to the real-estate market, which perhaps excludes me from this list of the clue-adverse:

This is perhaps the most frightening news of all, that so many people still haven’t adjusted their expectations to economic reality. Maybe they’re under the influence of Kudlowism or, more likely, they’re liberals who think that the Department of Unicorns and Rainbows has already fixed the economy.

People who haven’t actually tried to sell their homes, and who haven’t paid attention to the real-estate market, seem to imagine that the crash that hit last September was just a blip signaling a short-term recession and now we’re in blue-sky territory. When the sheriff’s auction becomes the primary venue for home sales, maybe people will start paying attention.

Foreclosures are indeed up in Oklahoma, but the situation here is decidedly less dire than in other places where the bubbles were bigger. For the last couple of months, I’ve been watching four houses nearby to see if I could detect any trend. Two have sold; one was turned over on a lease-purchase deal; one remains on the market. This is not necessarily representative of the whole state, or even of the northwest quadrant of Oklahoma City, but I have to assume that folks here aren’t entirely discouraged yet, especially since another one in the zone being monitored went on sale this month.

And the arrival this past week of the chairman of the National Association of Home Builders failed to regloomify the local market:

Nationally, home building is reeling, in some places it’s on the ropes — and in a few particularly hard-hit markets, it’s knocked cold.

“Normal” production used to be 1.8 million new units a year; now the pace is about 380,000 units, [Joe Robson] said. Being an Oklahoman of some experience makes his burden a lot lighter, especially now.

Things could be a lot worse here. Home sales are off and construction has been cut way back, but home values on average have remained firm, even ticking up at times.

That’s a 79-percent drop nationwide. Local builder Jeff Click has been tracking building permits in metro Oklahoma City, which are off by about half as much. Maybe we can say that it’s only half as bad here.

Well, looky here: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has ordered a stay of the Chrysler absorption by Fiat, pending a review of the whole shebang by the Supremes.

If this doesn’t wrap up in a week, the whole deal could be scotched:

Chrysler has until June 15 to emerge free and clear, else Fiat can walk away. And if that happens, Chrysler might owe Fiat $35 million — which is just $7 million short of what the three Indiana funds [who filed the suit] together have invested in the Pentastar.

All of a sudden the fait looks a hell of a lot less accompli.

Update: SCOTUSblog:

The wording of Ginsburg’s order — “stayed pending further order” — is the conventional way by which a Justice or the Court carries out an action that is expected to be short in duration, and not controlling — or even hinting at — the ultimate outcome. Any speculation that her order meant the Court was leaning toward a further postponement would be unfounded.

I’d bet on the Blue Oval.

It’s official: Roger Penske’s Automotive Group will acquire the Saturn brand from Government General Motors for a price believed to be somewhere north of three dollars and a sackful of kittens.

Saturn’s five-vehicle line is being pared to three — the Sky roadster and the compact Astra sedan will be put to sleep — and GM will continue to build the remaining vehicles (the Vue SUV, the Outlook crossover, and the mid-sized Aura sedan) for two years. All of these, I note, are bigger than the models being deep-sixed.

The deal is expected to be completed in October.

The German automaker, owned since 1929 by General Motors, is apparently not going to be thrown to the hounds of bankruptcy: a last-minute deal this weekend will reduce GM’s holdings to 35 percent, with 35 percent to be owned by Sberbank in Russia, 20 percent by Canadian parts supplier Magna, and 10 percent by Opel employees. Magna and Sberbank will kick in 500 to 700 million euros to finance the deal, and will seek loan guarantees from the German government. GM will not receive any cash: their compensation will come from continued access to Opel technology. All four German plants will be kept open, though job cuts are likely.

Still unclear: the future of Vauxhall, the GM outpost in Britain, and its two assembly plants, and of the Opel plant in Antwerp, Belgium.

Telesto Ventures, the group backed by Oklahoma City-based Black Oak Partners LLC and several Saturn dealers, is considered one of the finalists in the competition (and who expected competition?) to acquire the Saturn brand from fading General Motors.

When I first mentioned the group, I said something to this effect:

Unlike this earlier proposal, the Black Oak group would not hook up with one existing manufacturer as sole source: Saturn 2.0 would maintain a design team, which would then work with outside automakers to tailor appropriate models accordingly.

Said design team has now been revealed to include one certified heavy hitter: Tom Gale, once nominated for Car Designer of the Century for his Dodge Viper, the force behind both Chrysler’s famed LH “cab-forward” sedans in the 1990s and the rear-drive LX platform (300C) that replaced them.

Telesto, in fact, seems to have become the place for Chrysler exiles:

The Telesto Ventures team also includes Ted Cunningham, Chrysler’s former sales chief, who also worked for DaimlerChrysler AG after the 1998 tie-up with DaimlerChrysler, and Susan Unger, another past Chrysler executive, who worked as DaimlerChrysler’s chief information officer and as a senior vice president.

[Steve] Torok, who was in charge of [Mitsubishi's] business outside Japan, including its unprofitable U.S. unit, resigned in early 2004. He previously served as vice-president of sales and marketing integration and strategic planning for DaimlerChrysler.

Inasmuch as none of these folks had any particular responsibility for the Chrysler Chrysis that led the company into a heavily-rewritten Chapter 11, there’s at least a reasonable chance that sanity might prevail at Saturn 2.0, should this deal come to fruition.

If you have $300 million to spare, Hugh Hefner would like to hear from you:

Playboy Enterprises, the far-flung empire founded by Hugh Hefner in 1953, is quietly being shopped around for $300 million, sources tell Media Ink.

But so far, well-heeled suitors that have been approached, like Apollo Capital Partners and Providence Equity Partners, haven’t stepped up.

The battered company’s market capitalization is now around $100 million and nobody has been willing to pay the substantial premium that it would take to persuade Hef to sell.

Sources said the sellers are looking for far more than the company’s market capitalization because that would ensure Hef has enough on hand to maintain his lavish lifestyle.

The magazine has already cut back to 11 issues a year, but the product quality has been suffering for some time:

Playboy Interview, April through June 1965: Art Buchwald, Jean-Paul Sartre, Melvin Belli.

Playboy Interview, April through June 2005: Les Moonves, James Spader, Lance Armstrong.

Personally, I think Adobe should buy it: if there’s any common component to be found in contemporary commercial erotica, it’s Photoshop.

But the funniest possible acquisition, I submit, would be by Virgin.

Note to the President’s Task Force on Autos: You might want to study this case in detail before the berserkers are set free:

Workers at Honda’s Swindon plant have voted in favour of taking a 3% pay cut for 10 months in an attempt to safeguard 490 jobs.

In return, the workers will receive a bonus of six additional days’ leave, Unite the union said.

And this helps:

Managers’ pay will be cut by 5%.

The plant, shuttered for four months, will reopen in June, and everyone hopes that the British car-buying public will respond to the government’s scrappage scheme.

(Via Autoblog.)

Chrysler, as noted here before, is firing 789 dealers. And while they can — the dissolution of the dealer franchises is scheduled for the 9th of June — the soon-to-be ex-dealers are dealing:

Dale Horn, owner of a Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep dealership in Malvern, Ark., whose franchise was cut, isn’t counting on any help from the company to unload his inventory of 34 vehicles.

“Right now, I don’t have much confidence that they will do what they say. Nobody’s called me yet saying they’re going to try to help me,” Horn said.

Still, he’s determined to sell the cars and trucks before June 9, and he’s not ruling out selling at a loss.

“It’s not a matter of ‘if.’ We will sell them all,” Horn said.

Of course, if you subsequently need warranty work, you’ll have to apply to the Federal Bureau of Auto Service and wait, but hey, there are only 44,000 stranded Mopars out there. How long can the line be?

In semi-socialist America, Dodge gets the hell out of you.

Chrysler is cutting loose 789 dealerships, including the following Oklahoma stores:

• Ballard’s of Clinton
• Eddie Cordes, Lawton
• Fenton Motors, Stillwater
• Janzen Jeep, Enid
• Jensen’s Inc., Fairview
• John Thomas, Cordell
• Crossroads Superstore, Atoka
• Milo Gordon Chrysler, Lawton
• Oakley Jeep, Bartlesville
• Reynolds Auto Group, Durant
• Williams Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep, Stigler
• Wilson Jeep, Stillwater

Here’s where it gets interesting:

Chrysler, because it is under Bankruptcy Court protection, will not be required to buy back vehicles, tools or parts from rejected dealers.

However:

Chrysler will match rejected dealers with accepted dealers, who will buy back parts, tools and vehicles.

Assuming, of course, the surviving dealers actually want all that stuff.

This does not reassure me about the stability of the New Government-Approved Chrysler:

When I purchased my ‘09 300C I traded in an ‘05 that had a Chrysler extended service contract with time and mileage remaining. I called Chrysler and they gave me all of the information for obtaining a pro-rata refund as per the contract. I faxed it over and got very quick service. I had a check from Chrysler in the amount of $363.62 in under two weeks. I cashed it at my bank and today my bank mailed it back to me: Insufficient Funds! The check was drawn on a JP Morgan Chase account. I guess the bankruptcy is going to strike close to home.

The next step, of course, is to send the bill to Barack Obama.