当地时间6月1日，美国“百年老店”通用汽车公司（GM）将正式向法院申请破产保护。成立于1908年通用汽车将成为依美国《破产法》第11章申请破产的美国第三大企业、第一大制造业企业，也是破产涉及员工人数第二大企业。
5月31日，是奥巴马政府要求通用完成削减约270亿美元债务避免破产重组的最后期限。通用目前还并未就是否申请破产作出表态，最后的发布会将于6月1日在纽约召开。
业内普遍认为破产保护是通用最好选择。
虽然与美国汽车工人联合会（UAW）达成协议，但是通用债权人接受债转股协议的最后期限已过，申请破产保护预期增强。此前规定债权人接受债转股计划的期限为当地时间30日下午5点（北京时间31日凌晨），此前债转股计划希望削减债务270亿美元，遭到90%债权人反对。
预计奥巴马会在6月1日发表讲话，宣布美国政府为通用汽车制定的计划，计划中将包含许多奥巴马此前两次谈到美国汽车业时所说的要点，即政府虽然并不情愿涉足美国汽车业重组，但相信自己能够重塑通用和克莱斯勒，并至少能让纳税人的投资不至全部付诸东流。
据知情人士透露，美国财政部将得到“新通用”70%的股份，并将为通用汽车提供500亿美元资金协助其改革重组，帮助其进入美《破产法》11章破产保护程序，瘦身精简并形成“新通用”，发展高效节能车型。
另外，美国汽车联合工会将通过其退休人员健康保障基金持股17.5%。另外，该基金还获得2.5%股份的购买保证，交易价格稍后确定。也就是说，美国汽车工人联合会将通过旗下的工人退休医疗基金（VEBA）得到“新通用”20%的股份。其他债券持有者们将持有新集团10%的股份。
奥巴马政府曾积极促成通用债权人接受削减债务的机会，迄今已向通用提供资金救助近500亿美元。通用汽车金融公司（GMAC）在危机期间也接受政府资金支持。
针对通用汽车即将宣布破产保护的消息，通用中国表示，公司总部将于6月1日召开发布会公布，但是通用中国未就发布会主题作出更详细的解释。通用表示，通用中国的业务依然正常进行，将维持现有模式。WASHINGTON — President Obama will push General Motors into bankruptcy protection on Monday, making a risky bet that by temporarily nationalizing the onetime icon of American capitalism, he can save at least a diminished automaker that is competitive.
The bankruptcy, to be filed in New York, is a moment of reckoning for an industry that was once at the heart of the American economy. It culminates a remarkable four months of confrontation between Washington and Detroit that is expected to result in a drastic downsizing of the company.
It also places the government in uncharted territory as a business owner, as it takes a 60 percent ownership stake in the company during its restructuring.
Reflecting the government’s extraordinary intervention in industry, aides say, Mr. Obama plans to tell the nation on Monday that he believes G.M. can be brought back from the brink of insolvency, even if the company looks almost nothing like the titan of old.
Meanwhile, a federal judge late Sunday night cleared a path for Chrysler to get out of bankruptcy by approving a sale of most of that carmaker’s assets to a new entity to be run by Fiat of Italy.
Administration officials briefed reporters on the G.M. plans Sunday night, as President Obama began to inform members of Congress. But the White House insisted that the aides who talked to reporters could not be named.
In his remarks on Monday, Mr. Obama will spell out a strategy in which a shrunken G.M. can make money even if new car sales remain at a sluggish 10 million a year in the United States and even if G.M., once the giant of the industry, drops below its current 20 percent market share in this country.
But to get there, American taxpayers will invest an additional $30 billion in the company, atop $20 billion already spent just to keep it solvent as the company bled cash as quickly as Washington could inject it. Whether that investment will ever be recovered is still an open question.
The company will also have to shed 21,000 union workers and close 12 to 20 factories, steps that most analysts thought could never be pushed through by a Democratic president allied with organized labor.
Forty percent of the company’s 6,000 dealers will close, the workers’ union will be forced to finance half of its $20 billion health care fund with stock of uncertain value in the restructured G.M., and bondholders, including many retirees, will be forced to take stock worth 10 cents for every dollar they lent the company.
The company’s last steps toward bankruptcy took place over the weekend as a majority of G.M. bondholders agreed not to challenge the filing in court and to exchange their debt for stock.
Lawrence H. Summers, who as head of the National Economic Council serves as one of the co-heads of the auto task force, argued in an interview on Sunday that the bailout of the auto industry was fundamentally different from the Mexican bailout in 1994, the Asian economic crisis in the late 1990s, and the continuing banking crisis.
General Motors and Chrysler, he said, were “clear cases of insolvency,” in which mere loans would not accomplish the goal of getting the automakers past a temporary crisis. “There was no argument that they were solvent, no argument they could meet their obligations.”
He said that left the Obama administration to decide whether to allow “a laissez-faire, uncontrolled bankruptcy, which would have had an enormous cost,” or a “controlled process,” in which the goal was to make sure that the auto companies not only restructured, but were not overburdened with debt. So, in return for what amounted to debtor-in-possession financing, Mr. Obama chose to accept equity in the new company — while insisting that he had no intention of exercising day-to-day control over the company.
“It’s a fine line,” Mr. Summers said, “but we think it is manageable.”
To assist in the restructuring, the automaker is expected to hire the consulting firm Alix Partners, which has worked on several major bankruptcies, including those for Enron and Kmart. One of the firm’s partners, Al Koch, is expected to manage the liquidation of corporate assets that G.M. will shed during its Chapter 11 restructuring, people with knowledge of the strategy said.
Mr. Obama is taking several risks under the plan. None may be bigger than the decision that the United States government will take its 60 percent share of the stock in a new G.M., leaving taxpayers vulnerable if the overhaul is not successful. (Canada, for its part, is taking a 12 percent stake.) “We don’t think that after this next $30 billion, they will need more money,” one administration official said. “But the fact is there are things you don’t know — like when the car market will come back, and how much Toyota and Honda and Volkswagen will benefit from the chaos.”
On Monday, Mr. Obama is expected to argue that any alternative to his plan would be worse, and that a liquidation of G.M. — the only other real option — would send the unemployment rate soaring over 10 percent and would radiate damage throughout the economy.
But aware of the hardships the plan will impose on regions across the country that depend on auto production, the White House is dispatching a dozen Cabinet members and other officials across four states this week to reassure residents.
Aides say Mr. Obama will portray himself on Monday as a reluctant shareholder, eager to sell the company back to private investors, perhaps within 6 to 18 months.
Officials say the president will insist that once the government sets up new management and a board of directors, it will remove itself from G.M.’s day-to-day operations. But even his aides anticipate intense pressure as the company’s managers are called to testify in Congress and face questions like why they decided to build new cars in Mexico and South Korea, rather than in Michigan or the South.
“Congress and many Americans are going to say, if we own it, why can’t we make these decisions?” one of Mr. Obama’s top economic aides said, “and it’s going to be a challenge to answer that.”
To ease the way, the White House on Sunday briefed reporters on a new set of principles for how the government should behave as a majority shareholder. It argued that the government’s role should be limited primarily to the beginning of the process, but that it should then recede, becoming a passive investor, one seeking to sell its stake quickly.
At the same time, Mr. Obama has laid out goals for all the Detroit automakers that will presumably affect their major strategic decisions. He has urged them, for example, to build smaller cars with significantly better fuel efficiency.
Six months ago, even the suggestion of such deep intervention into G.M.’s operations would have raised huge objections. But by the time the denouement came, the company seemed almost relieved. Robert Lutz, G.M.’s vice chairman, said that “for the first time in our history, the American auto industry has the ear of the administration. Their number one goal is to make us successful.”
Nonetheless, Michael Useem, a professor of management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, said the decision would “mean a new chapter in the history books on American capitalism.” He added, “How we think about American free enterprise is really hanging in the balance.”
For Mr. Obama, whose ascent to the White House depended on carrying states across the industrial Midwest, the political risk is significant.
The G.M. bankruptcy will ripple across several states where hundreds of parts suppliers and car dealerships face imminent closings.
Indeed, the four states where Cabinet secretaries are focusing their efforts this week — Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin — all were carried by Mr. Obama last November. It was the first time Indiana has supported a Democratic presidential candidate in 44 years.
These Main Street political challenges will almost certainly be an issue for Democrats on the ballot in next year’s midterm election campaign and in the president’s own re-election effort in 2012. If those jobs shift to nonunion plants in the South, where German and Japanese carmakers have built their facilities, or overseas, Mr. Obama could face criticism inside his own party.
“It is unacceptable to ask U.S. workers to subsidize the exportation of their own jobs,” said Representative Dennis Kucinich, Democrat of Ohio, whose district includes Cleveland. “The taxpayers’ investment should be used to protect American plants so that American workers can build the next generation of automobiles.”
In his presidential campaign speeches last year, often delivered in the shadow of closed manufacturing plants, Mr. Obama bluntly conceded that most of the jobs would not come back. Instead, his administration is pointing to investments that the economic recovery act will make in communities.
Rob McNabney, chairman of the Madison County Democratic Party in Anderson, Ind., a onetime booming automotive center, said the problems for Mr. Obama were severe. “He’s going to be judged by what he does,” Mr. McNabney said.
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