GM II

This is more of a trial balloon than established fact, though it is interesting in its implications.

DETROIT — President Obama has dropped the idea of appointing a single, powerful “car czar” to oversee the revamping of General Motors and Chrysler and will instead keep the politically delicate task in the hands of his most senior economic advisers, a top administration official said Sunday night.

Mr. Obama is designating the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, and the chairman of the National Economic Council, Lawrence H. Summers, to oversee a presidential panel on the auto industry. Mr. Geithner will also supervise the $17.4 billion in loan agreements already in place with G.M. and Chrysler, said the official, who insisted on anonymity.

[...]

“We’re going to need a restructuring of these companies,” the adviser, David Axelrod, said on “Meet the Press” on NBC. He added that a turnaround of the companies would “require sacrifice not just from the auto workers but also from creditors, from shareholders and the executives who run the company.”

Considering that the National Economic Council includes my boss, who just laid me off, I'll go ahead and assume that their advice will be to break the union.

However, the thrust of this post is that this will mean either the bank plan; taxpayers assume all the bad stuff, including retiree pensions and the like, and GM gets off scot free, or it's nationalized, and taxpayers assume all the bad stuff anyway. I really don't see any middle ground. Unlike the banks, I don't see anybody else in the market who is in the position to buy up GM's assets, even at pennies on the dollar, so unless Buffet wants to take a crack at making cars, I think you pretty much have to nationalize the company.