GM; Chrysler Emerging From Bankruptcy

So, the slimmed down General Motors has emerged from bankruptcy and taxpayers are on the hook for the liabilities and bad parts of the company. Hooray! (that's sarcasm folks).

General Motors Corp. CEO Fritz Henderson says the new GM will be far faster and more responsive to customers than the old one.

Henderson said today the company had emerged from bankruptcy protection far faster than anyone thought it could.

He says the company now will focus more on customers, including a partnership with eBay for people to buy vehicles by auction online.

Henderson says the company will build more cars and trucks that consumers want and launch them faster than in the past.Once the world's largest and most powerful automaker, new GM is now cleansed of massive debt and burdensome contracts that would have sunk it without federal loans.

But the new GM also emerges amidst the worst sales slump in a quarter-century.

The massive transfer of factories, money and intellectual property was completed about 6:30 a.m., according to a person briefed on the situation, clearing the way for a smaller and faster company better equipped to compete in the brutally tough global automotive market.

The person, who asked to remain anonymous because the deal wasn't announced officially, said the signing meant the new GM had emerged from bankruptcy. The person said lawyers spent the night signing a 2-foot-high pile of documents clearing the way for the asset sale to the new company.

One bankruptcy expert called GM's 40-day case the fastest ever for a company of its size.

The new company claims that it will be more responsive to customer needs and wishes, but I wonder how exactly they're going to pull that one off. Products take years to develop from conception to street version. Consumers were big on SUVs until they ceased doing so. The government is putting the screws to the automakers to produce cars of a certain type, but that doesn't mean that consumers will go for it.

It also doesn't address who will be in charge and how new deals with the unions will take place given that the unions now have an ownership stake in the company (and the UAW also now has an ownership stake in a company that competes against Ford). GM will continue cutting jobs to trim its costs, but there's no guarantee that consumers will buy their cars.