uh oh, chrysler closing ALL plants for 1 mos

[unknownroad]

Originally Posted by ducati_atx

Yup, its much better to keep paying them not to work while sticking ones hand out asking for more government money. To me, its just postponing them firing all the workers.

Shuttering Chrysler is hardly inevitable.

It was only a year and a half ago that they were bought out by Cerberus. With grand promises-

"Our plan really is to provide patient capital," says Cerberus spokesman Peter Duda; to "free management from quarter-to-quarter results and allow them to focus on a long-term recovery and transformation plan."

In 2007, they had $49 B in revenue, and 72,000 employees
(http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/...fortune/4.html)

Or maybe $59 B in revenue

(http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...d=aalBEC_fQHRE)

But either way, the consensus is that they lost money- $1.2 B in the Bloomberg article above, or maybe closer to $3 B (http://www.usatoday.com/money/econom...54538415_x.htm)

Hey, a few billion here or there. Whatever.

So let's take the most conservative scenario- $49 B revenue, with a $1.2 B loss. Rounding for convenience, that means they managed to lose $50 Billion dollars in a year.

$50,000,000,000

With 72,000 employees, that works out to a bit over $706,000 per person. Which is a damn sight more than even the wild-ass "$72/hour average wage" figure (a hair under $150k/year).

In fact, even if they did pay all 72,000 employees an average of $150K in 2007, that would only account for a fifth of the loss- they'd still be able to give away 1.4 Million cars at $30,000 net loss per vehicle before they hit the big negative $50B! The three domestic manufacturers together only sold 16 Billion cars that year.

So there's plenty of money moving around- far too much for anyone honest to be crying poverty.

The trick is finding anyone honest in a game with numbers that big