The Wall Street Journal's "Big" Plan For Ford, GM
The WSJ proves yet again despite being a newspaper on business often times they appear to know nothing about business. The triumvirate of WSJ talking heads, Rob Cox, Edward Chancellor, David Vise are offering up their version of a "solution" to GM and Ford's woes. For some strange reason Cox et al. believe the way to "Step 2" for Ford and GM may be by joining forces and creating a "Super-Big" auto manufacturer:
The survival of the American car industry requires the barons of Detroit to think radically — something they've thus far avoided doing. Now is the time for their conservative minds to consider something truly transformational: a merger of General Motors and Ford Motor.
Yes, that would be truly transformational. It would create the world's largest messed up car company is what it would do. Think about...
...how dysfunctional that two-headed beast would be, and how incompatible those product line-ups are. What is the Journal thinking — do they know nothing about auto companies? Oh wait, they try to take it all back in the next paragraph:
That may sound wacky.
You think? What's wacky to us is when a newspaper about business has writers who've clearly never established the merits of an idea before they write about it. We wish we could send you straight to the article itself, but as its behind the Journal's fortress of paid content, we'll have to send you over to ClickOnDetroit's article — which gives us probably our favorite quote of the whole silly idea — it's from AMCI auto analyst Jim Sanfilippo:
"This is the kind of idea generated by people who neither drive cars nor pay attention to the business...gee why doesn't the last-place team buy a couple of Yankees and everything would be fine. It's just not a realistic scenario."
Couldn't agree more Jim.
Report: Combined GM, Ford Would Emerge Stronger [ClickOnDetroit.com]
Related:
Toyota Tells All: "GM Hasn't Talked To Us, We Haven't Talked To Them." [internal]