The Great Debate

It's not often you get to lift the hood and watch a power struggle going on in the engine room of General Motors. But the vice-president of GM Europe, John Smith, has just provided tantilising details of the arguments over the rival bids for Opel/Vauxhall, the main European arm of the fallen U.S. auto giant. Smith is the chief negotiator on the sale of Opel.

In a blog apparently intended to reassure Opel staff, but accessible to the public, he insisted GM had not specified a preferred bidder. But he made clear his own preference for the bid from Belgian financial investor RHJ International, which is loosely related to U.S. private equity fund Ripplewood, over the offer by Canadian-Austrian car parts maker Magna and its Kremlin-backed Russian partner Sberbank.

Smith's post is entitled "Clearing the Air" and was ostensibly written to clarify GM's intentions and dispel erroneous reports ascribed to interested parties. But his account shows just how poisonous the atmosphere appears to be between GM and Magna, and GM and the German government, which backs Magna's bid. It also suggests that the air is not too clear within GM's top management either.

Specific to the Magna bid, which is clearly preferred by several politicians and the Labor Bench, the bid presented to GM varied from the negotiations we had in the previous weeks and contained elements around intellectual property and our Russian operations that simply could not be implemented...

The bid from RHJI is completed and would represent a much simpler structure and would be easier to implement. It would require less monetary participation by the government and would keep our global alignments solid, while still creating an independent Opel/Vauxhall organization in Germany. This remains a reasonable and viable option to be considered as the very difficult issues around the Magna negotiations continue to be worked.

– Margaret Doyle is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are her own –

Germany’s politicians seem to have rescued their bad bank. Pushing back the valuation date for toxic assets to before the Lehman collapse has made it more likely that banks will consign their dud investments to the voluntary scheme.

It had looked as if the banks might simply boycott it. However, while the government has scored a political goal, it is no closer to its aim of boosting lending to a credit-starved German economy.
The essence of the scheme is that banks will be able to transfer some 250 billion euros of toxic assets into “eine Bad Bank”. In exchange they receive government-backed paper that they can count towards regulatory capital.

– Paul Taylor is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

Higher taxes? Lower public spending? Devaluation? Inflation? Investment in green growth?

European governments are pointing in very different directions as they debate an exit strategy from the global financial crisis. Despite European Union efforts to coordinate economic policy, there are clear signs that the main European economies will charge off in disarray towards separate exits.

-- Margaret Doyle and Paul Taylor are Reuters columnists. The opinions expressed are their own --

LONDON/PARIS, April 23 (Reuters) - Germany is to set up a system of bad banks before the summer recess to hold some 250 billion euros of toxic assets. Finance Minister Peer Steinbruek has assured taxpayers that his solution -- called "eine Bad Bank" (there is no German word for the concept) -- will not weigh on the budget.

He is fooling them, if not himself. If the rescue really were such a free ride for the taxpayer, some savvy commercial investor would have stepped in. Under the proposed scheme, the taxpayer will end up carrying the risk of "Schrottpapiere" (scrap paper).

– Paul Taylor is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

The United States is fighting a fire in the world economy, but Germany and some other European countries fear a flood of inflation as a result.

That clash of cultures is at the heart of transatlantic debate over whether Europe should spend more and ease monetary policy to revive growth, with a deep economic contraction certain this year and an end to the recession not yet in sight.