When sales get tough, the Big 3 throw money at it. The magic mantra seems to be "rebate." Whether it works or not is debatable.
GMAC has been a cash cow for GM for decades, sometimes outperforming any other arm in the GM octopus, but it's in big trouble according to Reuters newswire reports.
Seems the predatory lending and mortgage mess has seeped into the wonderful world of auto financing. A year ago GMAC turned in a whopping $305 million loss, nearly one third of a billion (with a big "B") dollar loss. Well, things got worse as time went by.
Now, GMAC's loss has jumped up to $589 million. Not a small chunk of change, folks. Somebody better get out the bandaids and stop the bleeding or they'll end up looking like Chrysler.
Much of the blame is being heaped on the huge mortgage division losses coming out of Residential Capital, now running 6 quarters of losses in a row. Seems like even they were trying to get in on the mortgage subprime mess to see just how quickly they could lose money.
GM's money mess is one of the reasons that GM sold off 51% of GMAC to private quity firm Cerberus Capital back in 2006, but apparently it was on a downhill slide way back then. We'd hate to think the smart guys at Cerberus were the ones who took that dive into the subprime disaster.
So how bad can it get? Well, we'll soon see. There's $17 billion of debt coming due this year and it'll probably shake GMAC up. Still GMAC has $18.6 billion of cash and claimed liquid assets so one would think that would look pretty healthy. Problem is, that number is down from $22.7 billion just a few months ago.
A $4 billion loss in just 3 months is kinda hard to make up no matter how long you take at it.
Could rebates be coming on the metal? Maybe they ought to be thinking about rebates on the mortgages too?
Meanwhile, if you've got a lemon GM car or truck, you might want to be thinking of trading it in on a Ford. At least they made a profit lately. If you can't or don't want to trade it it, email or call us 1-888-331-6422 Toll Free and we'll help you make GM take it back and give you back your money, for free. That's what we do. Everyday.