General Motors Just Dropped Its Engine
The mostly inept or inapt analogies with 1929 are a natural feature of the economic landscape. Yet, one rather eerie comparison with those days was just reported on CNBC: General Motors’ market capitalization just fell to 1929 levels. Think of it as one of the Mount Rushmore Presidents shrinking to George W. Bush’s hat size, or to about the size of Dick Cheney’s capacity for empathy (O.K., it’s actually a lot larger than that . . .).
Whatever comparisons or analogies one chooses, in Wall Street worth, from March of 2000 to today, GM has fallen from $52 Billion to $2 Billion. That is called its “market capitalization” and is the simple mathematical result of multiplying the total of outstanding GM shares by its present per share price on the exchange (today approximately $6.50/share). By any measure, just like the depression era Cadillac in the video above. the producer of American auto icons Cadillac, Buick, Chevrolet, and Oldsmobile has run off the road and gone turtle up into a ditch.
Check the CNN chart below: in less than ten years GM has lost more than 90% of its value, $90+/share to about $6.50/share, with one-half of that decline in the last month. And there’s a comparison with the depression that might well be called apt.
