They were still buying General Motors shares on Thursday, as if the company deserved its space in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. GM stock dipped 3 cents to $1.12 on Thursday after rising more than a dime earlier.
If this column were owned by the financial wires, it would assign glib and dubious causes to GM's blip. Europe eyes new GM bailouts! A few creditors agreed to a revised restructuring plan!
There are no reasons to buy GM stock, however, except nostalgia and the cool picture of cars and smokestacks on the certificate. Parts of GM will thrive once all this is over. The company's White Marsh transmission plant is almost certainly one of them.
But as a company that once enriched shareholders and stood as proxy for manufacturing and America itself, GM will cease to exist Monday. That's Washington's deadline for a recovery plan. The second deadline, actually, but this one will prove no more flexible than the crash-test barriers that regularly crumple GM's small trucks.
Bankruptcy proceedings are often invisible. The idea is to reduce liabilities and relaunch a business without insufferable interest and health-insurance payments. Airlines get cycled through the Chapter 11 machine, and most fliers are none the wiser.
GM will be different, and not just because of the extra headlines. More than 1,000 dealerships will disappear, removing the company's name and face from communities.
Despite Washington's promise to stand by warranties, bankruptcy proceedings will reverse years of expensive GM image-building and might repel buyers, hurting the company's future value.
Impending doom in Detroit is tripping faraway triggers. GM is trying to sell GM Europe, which includes Saab in Sweden, Adam Opel in Germany and Vauxhall in Britain. But those divisions have their own problems and face threats of closure and downsizing similar to those of the U.S. plants.
Germany pleaded with Washington on Thursday for support in shielding Opel from bankruptcy repercussions - a one-country approach that would challenge Europe's economic integration. Belgium begs to differ.
GM's bankruptcy filing - there is little question it will happen - will let it cut commitments not just to workers and lenders but to thousands of vendors and other stakeholders. Satellite radio churl Howard Stern will probably soon have even fewer listeners, since GM is the biggest buyer of Sirius XM radios.
