General Motors stock skids on bankruptcy reports

[Genx87]

Unfuckingbelievable!

 

[JSt0rm]

Originally posted by: 3chordcharlie
Speaking of which, working at a grocery store used to be a career-quality occupation.

people who work at grocery stores dont deserve good lives. If only they would work hard...

 

[LegendKiller]

Originally posted by: 3chordcharlie

Originally posted by: SickBeast
GM has 3 retired people collecting a pension for every person they have actively working. That is their main problem, and I'm actually surprised they have done as well as they have in light of this.

They say that due to labour costs, GM has to make their cars $3K crappier just to be able to compete on price.

IMO this will set a good example for unions so that they can see what will happen if they are unreasonable and give the workers too much. The same goes for corporate greed and overpaid CEOs.

There is going to be a lot of pain as result of this bankruptcy. I think the government only gave them the money so that people couldn't point the finger at them when the economy went way down. Now they can at least say that they tried.

The pension is not payed by GM. It is, like most pensions, an investment fund.

Three years ago, GM's pension was $6billion overfunded, according to the genius accountants who predicted 12% average returns forever. At that time I'd imagine they took a nice contribution holiday.

BTW you can thank Canadian hero Conrad Black for blazing the trail of pension-fund pillaging (I believe at Dominion Grocers). Speaking of which, working at a grocery store used to be a career-quality occupation.

The inherent problem with pensions is their managers. They do exactly as you described, imagine massive returns forever. This results in over-estimation and "over funding", upon which the company raids the pensions, bringing revenue back and using cash that others have paid in. Other ways they do this is through screwing with the actuarial models (life expectancy and such).

Overall, it is not the idea of a defined benefit plan that is at fault, but the ability to use over-zealous assumptions in the modeling and the actual raiding of the pension, that are at fault. There are thousands of examples of well managed pension funds.

Overall, I believe that pension funds should have very conservative return assumptions, higher contributions from employees, plus employers, and come with the inability to "overfund" and change the assumptions easily.

 

[LegendKiller]

Originally posted by: JSt0rm01

Originally posted by: 3chordcharlie
Speaking of which, working at a grocery store used to be a career-quality occupation.

people who work at grocery stores dont deserve good lives. If only they would work hard...

I could say that about anybody who hasn't received at least a masters-level education and makes six figures. Fuck all of you greedy bastards who are lazy.

 

[3chordcharlie]

Originally posted by: LegendKiller

Originally posted by: 3chordcharlie

Originally posted by: SickBeast
GM has 3 retired people collecting a pension for every person they have actively working. That is their main problem, and I'm actually surprised they have done as well as they have in light of this.

They say that due to labour costs, GM has to make their cars $3K crappier just to be able to compete on price.

IMO this will set a good example for unions so that they can see what will happen if they are unreasonable and give the workers too much. The same goes for corporate greed and overpaid CEOs.

There is going to be a lot of pain as result of this bankruptcy. I think the government only gave them the money so that people couldn't point the finger at them when the economy went way down. Now they can at least say that they tried.

The pension is not payed by GM. It is, like most pensions, an investment fund.

Three years ago, GM's pension was $6billion overfunded, according to the genius accountants who predicted 12% average returns forever. At that time I'd imagine they took a nice contribution holiday.

BTW you can thank Canadian hero Conrad Black for blazing the trail of pension-fund pillaging (I believe at Dominion Grocers). Speaking of which, working at a grocery store used to be a career-quality occupation.

The inherent problem with pensions is their managers. They do exactly as you described, imagine massive returns forever. This results in over-estimation and "over funding", upon which the company raids the pensions, bringing revenue back and using cash that others have paid in. Other ways they do this is through screwing with the actuarial models (life expectancy and such).

Overall, it is not the idea of a defined benefit plan that is at fault, but the ability to use over-zealous assumptions in the modeling and the actual raiding of the pension, that are at fault. There are thousands of examples of well managed pension funds.

Overall, I believe that pension funds should have very conservative return assumptions, higher contributions from employees, plus employers, and come with the inability to "overfund" and change the assumptions easily.

I certainly think they should not be 'accounted' by those with a vested interest in the outcome, nor should overfunding ever allow the fund to be raided.

There have been too many cases of perfectly healthy pension funds being pillaged, and thousands of employees left to rot.

 

[Cattlegod]

Originally posted by: dullard

Originally posted by: LegendKiller
Ever hear of DIP financing? That was more or less what the government did.

With with DIP financing, you have no guarantee of getting the debt repaid. Even if the debt is repaid, you have no guarantee that you'll get your lost interest back (the government had to pay interest to borrow the money). Even if you get the principal and interest back, you have no way of recovering the harm done to the economy due to having a massive zombie car company in the news for months.

You are first in line with DIP refinancing, senior to even the other banks and bond holders. and well, with the government giving the loan, they can pretty much do whatever they want.

 

[SickBeast]

I used to work at Dominion and everyone there hated Conrad Black. Apparently after he pillaged the pensions, he said "my employees stole from me for years". :Q

There's a good reason why he's rotting in a jail cell right now. He got what was coming to him, it just took longer than it should have.

 

[Harvey]

Originally posted by: Fear No Evil

Fairness is a fundamentally emotional thing. When people start making an argument on the basis of fairness its usually because it lacks anything quantifiable to back it up.

The two main branches of the American legal system, civil and criminal law. Civil law derives from English common law. Today, "civil" law is also known as "equity" law. That includes contract law.

Go back to law school.

Federal Rules of Civil Procedure

State and federal courts maintain separate procedural rules. On the federal level, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure govern the process of civil litigation at the level of the U.S. district court, which is a trial court. At least one U.S. district court operates in each state. Each district court also exists within one of thirteen federal circuits. Any appeal of a decision by a U.S. district court is heard by the court of appeals for the federal circuit in which the district court sits. Appeals of decisions by a U.S. court of appeals may be heard by the Supreme Court of the United States.

The Supreme Court and the courts of appeals use procedures contained in the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure and in the U.S. Supreme Court Rules. As reviewing courts, they are concerned with the district courts' application of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure are now contained in title 28 of the U.S. Code. Before 1938, the procedural rules in U.S. district courts varied from circuit to circuit. The rules in the western United States, for example, were generally less complex than those in the East. To add to the confusion, federal civil cases were designated either at law, which essentially meant that the relief sought was monetary or equitable, which meant that the court was asked to act on principles of fairness and, generally, to award nonmonetary relief. The distinction was important because the procedural rules for a case at law differed from those for an Equity suit.

In response to widespread criticism of procedural complexity, the U.S. Congress in 1934 passed the Federal Rules Enabling Act (28 U.S.C.A. §§ 2071, 2072). This act conferred on the Supreme Court the power to make new rules for federal courts. In 1938, new rules were recommended by an advisory committee appointed by the Supreme Court and approved by Congress. The new rules featured simplified Pleading requirements, comprehensive discovery procedures, a Pretrial Conference to narrow the scope of a trial and define issues, and broad provisions for joining parties and claims to a lawsuit. In addition, legal and equitable claims were merged to proceed with the same set of rules.

After the first set of uniform federal rules were promulgated, it became clear that continuous oversight of the rules was necessary to ensure their improvement. In 1958, Congress created the Judicial Conference of the United States, a freestanding body to study federal civil procedure and propose amendments to the Supreme Court. The Judicial Conference, in turn, created the ongoing Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure to help fashion the best procedural rules for federal courts. Subsequently amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure occurred on a regular basis.

State courts generally follow the same judicial hierarchy as federal courts. In all states, a party to a civil suit is entitled to at least one review of a trial court decision. In some states, a party may be entitled to two appeals: one in a court of appeals, and one in the state supreme court.

Procedural rules in state courts are similar to the federal rules. Indeed, many states base their procedural rules on the federal rules. Thus, there is a large measure of uniformity among the states and among state and federal courts.

 

[BoberFett]

Originally posted by: SickBeast
boomerang, if pensions are a Ponzi scheme, then who is at the top?

It's not about being at the top, it's about getting in on the ground floor. The first people in take more they put in, the last people in take out nothing. Retirement, other than person savings, was a losing proposition from the beginning. You can't pay people to do nothing, especially not while life expectancy and the associated medical bills keeps going up.

 

[SickBeast]

n/m