hang on, kids

Big storm headed for Detroit 3
By TOM WALSH • FREE PRESS COLUMNIST • October 19, 2008

Unthinkability is upon us. Or is it unthinkableness?

No matter, as "W" might say, it's reallymarkable, the stuff that's goin' on today, especially in Detroit.

And hold onto your helmets, dear readers, stranger days are coming.

Chrysler LLC will almost certainly disappear in the next few months, assimilated into General Motors Corp. or Renault-Nissan in a deal blessed, if not partially funded, by the U.S. government. Unless, that is, Chrysler is first peddled to an outfit from China, India, Italy or Russia.

GM, the world's largest company for most of the last century, could implode at any moment from the mounting pressures of being all things to all people, providing cars for every purse and purpose, plus generous pensions and pay and health benefits to support generations of workers and spouses and kids and retirees.

Rick Wagoner, GM's resilient CEO, who has survived previous predictions of his imminent demise, may bow out soon, no matter what becomes of the GM-Chrysler talks. His smarts and likability have kept him on top so far, but GM has underperformed for so long that somebody must ultimately pay the price -- and the loyal Wagoner has been reluctant to cut loose other top-level executives for not producing results.

Do I know this stuff is going to happen?

No, of course not, any more than I know exactly what buildings will be demolished the next time a tornado rips through town. But I'm pretty sure a cyclone is whipping through Detroit's automobile industry now and that we'll hardly recognize the landscape when it's gone.

Here's one small example of the unthinkable happening in these stressful times.

Don Leclair, Ford Motor Co.'s chief financial officer and widely respected whiz at crunching numbers, suddenly "retired" this month. The Oct. 10 announcement received only modest attention because reports of GM-Chrysler merger talks surfaced the same day.

Leclair retired at age 56; his replacement Lewis Booth is 59.

People well-wired to Ford's Glass House headquarters tell me Leclair's 32-year Ford career was cut short because some powerful people inside Ford didn't like working with him.

Ford's board of directors approved his early exit, I'm told, after weighing the internal conflicts against Leclair's considerable pluses. He was the CFO who led Ford's prescient move in 2006 to round up $23.4 billion in credit that provided a cash cushion for the more-difficult days that followed. Leclair was also said to be highly regarded by Ford director John Thornton and former Ford board member Robert Rubin, well-connected Wall Street titans who made key phone calls to help obtain the loans.

It's unthinkable, one might surmise, that Ford would dispatch a respected CFO, the guy most intimately familiar with its complex finances, during the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, because of some friction with colleagues. But strange things happen in high-stress times.

How desperate are these days in the auto industry?

One CEO put it this way to me the other day:

Think of the car business today as being a singles bar, one hour before closing.

No one wants to go home alone and everyone is buying everyone else a drink and trying to get friendly.

There will be winners and losers. Some will get lucky.

Some will be left behind.

Big Storm?

Thought you were refering to the weather

wow