First, fair disclosure:  this author owns an Oldsmobile … and a Pontiac! 
Second, in the “what were they thinking category” GM decides to close Pontiac when “[t]he division was still GM’s third-largest seller, with 278,000 sales last year, and it enjoyed the youngest average age of any GM brand.”  Both those points are really important, especially [...]

News reports now say that a negotiated resolution to Chrysler’s financial ills have stalled, causing the large automaker to file for chapter 11 as soon as today or  tomorrow.
“The Chapter 11 filing, which sources said would be done in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan, will send shock waves through the entire auto industry — [...]

In response to one case of confirmed swine flu and the fear of more cases which are suspected but have yet to be confirmed, the Fort Worth Independent School District closed yesterday.  The closing is through at least May 8th.  That decision means 80,000 students from 144 campuses are confined to their houses; which means: [...]

Here is a link to a site which defines financial terms, like the one for “Credit Default Swaps”: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/creditdefaultswap.asp
Plus there are links from that site to related articles which also discuss and define the term selected. 
 Michael

In what is likely to be the first major restructure of a once private US company conducted by the Treasury Department, GM has announced its proposed ownership structure under the new plan.  In a huge “loan to own” move, the US government would swap its debt for equity, the unions would get a large share [...]

…361 billion, for this quarter.  That is how much that the Treasury Department now says it needs to borrow.  It is a record amount.
“The administration is projecting the federal deficit for the entire budget year ending Sept. 30, will total a record $1.75 trillion. A deficit at that level would nearly quadruple the previous record [...]

This is a term to describe a certain type of creditor which is better off when its debtor files chapter 11 than if it agreed to an out of court workout proposal.  While there have always been circumstances when a filing is actually advantageous to the lender, the new forms of financial instruments, i.e. credit [...]

Here is a link to a map/article which shows the job gains/losses on a monthly basis across the country from January 2007 until present. 
http://www.slate.com/id/2216238/
It is an amazing visual representation of the job losses which have occurred in this country since February of 2008 (4.2 million lost jobs). 
Michael

Evidently, the US government has made an agreement with the UAW which will then make a Chrysler bankruptcy more likely to succeed.  So now the Treasury Department is “preparing” a chapter 11 for Chrysler.  And the Fiat merger will happen within the context of that filing.  About that merger, in an article entitled “Finance it [...]

As was noted here in the December 18 post, just because a bank takes TARP money does not mean that said institution will continue to loan money.  The Wall Street journal confirms that this is the case in a recent article which notes: “Leanding at the nation’s biggest banks has fallen more sharply than previously [...]