Don’t you just love it? General Motors can’t make a quality car to save its life, which is what it’s trying to do, and it wants Nissan to give it billions of dollars to show respect for a failed company. Over the last couple of years, you have heard of failed nation states, many of them in Africa. Countries that can’t feed themselves, and have just about as much wealth as is necessary to put an embassy in NY, so their diplomats can dine at the United Nations, and park overnight with diplomatic plates.

Now we have failed corporate states like General Motors who can’t get out of their own way, and probably have no justification for remaining in business other than the fact that they’ve been around for something approaching a century. If you really think about it, other than the employees who would anyone miss General Motors if they went out of business tomorrow, maybe even today. The remaining players would immediately pick up their market share, and we wouldn’t have to watch the slow market attrition that is taking that share down anyway.

There will come a time if they remain in business, that only aliens coming to visit our planet will buy General Motors vehicles. The news recently is ludicrous. Carlos Ghosn runs Nissan-Renault. This man has done a world-class turnaround over the last several years, making billions of dollars for a company that very few thought could be turned around.

Rick Wagoner is the typical corporate bureaucrat that spent decades at GM while its market share slid down the tubes. The two of them have been talking about some sort of consortium at the behest of GM’s major shareholder Kirk Kerkorian, who wants GM turned around tonight, today, yesterday. Wagoner has now decided that Nissan should pay GM billions of dollars for GM’s perceived greater value.

What value? Hey dude, you just lost $10 billion last year. You’ve bought out thirty five thousand employees that you can’t find work for. You’re a textbook case study in how to lose money by selling inferior products, and you believe you bring greater value to a partnership with Nissan, than Nissan brings to you. HELLO, ANYBODY HOME?

One of the first lessons anybody learns if they are active in the stock market is, you have to deal with reality, not your perceived reality, but what’s really taking place. GM has yet to do a full, truthful self-assessment and figure out where they are. What are you doing wrong? You can’t be doing things right, and lose $10 billion in a year. You’ve got sales all right, but your customers are so disenchanted with your product that they are not allowing you to price your product at a number that allows you to take a profit out of the sale. That’s how you lose money, and you can’t make it up on volume. You also have the issue of your competition’s pricing. The other guys are giving their customers perceived value and real value. The value is so great, that it is disallowing you a profit in the vehicles that you are putting on the market. It’s that simple.

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