Bailout

Who deserves the credit for GM?

By Felix Salmon

Andrew Ross Sorkin loves private equity.

Sorkin finally get around to responding to Malcolm Gladwell today, and he’s unimpressed. Here’s how he frames the question:

Can financiers ever do anything beyond financial engineering?

With General Motors planning an initial public offering for Thursday that values the once-left-for-dead company at more than $50 billion, the answer to that question is more than theoretical.

How did G.M. become one of the greatest turnaround stories, at the moment at least, in history?

You can guess where Sorkin ends up. While Gladwell gives a lot of credit for GM’s current health to Rick Wagoner, Sorkin dismisses Wagoner as the CEO under whom GM went bankrupt. Instead, he says, “the GM turnaround is ultimately an act of financial engineering”?the financial engineering that Steve Rattner takes lots of credit for in his book, and which Sorkin is happy to ratify as one of the greatest turnarounds in history.

The financial engineering at GM was difficult and impressive. But in principle it’s neither difficult nor praiseworthy to take an insolvent company, put it through bankruptcy, and let it emerge under the ownership of its former creditors and people who provided DIP funding.

Bankruptcy, in theory and in practice, is essentially just a change of ownership. It’s not easy, and it carries non-negligible costs; Rattner did a good job of minimizing those costs and therefore maximizing the value of the post-bankruptcy GM. But you don’t need PE honchos to orchestrate a bankruptcy filing and rid a company of its liabilities. And the main thing that Rattner did with GM was to lubricate the process with something over $50 billion in US taxpayer money, most of which went to pay off GM’s creditors, and much of which is unlikely to ever be repaid.

Rattner deserves praise for what he did. But so does Wagoner, and so do all the workers who have worked and who continue to work to actually make the cars that GM sells. The financial engineering might have been a necessary part of the turnaround process. But it wasn’t remotely sufficient.

Full post as published by Macroprudential on November 16, 2010 (boomark / email).