A few years ago, there was a book out called “Tuesdays with Morrie.” At Reuters, though, we spend our Tuesday mornings during Auto Summits with Ron.

It wouldn’t be a Reuters Autos Summit without our yearly visit from United Auto Workers head Ron Gettelfinger … at the crack of dawn.

Gettelfinger is not one to loaf around and show up at our summit at a leisurely hour of, say, sometime after the sun rises. Oh no. Gettelfinger was scheduled to kick off our Tuesday slate of guests at 7:00 am. But by now we know better.

In fact, when coming into the building this morning sometime after 6:00 am, Gettelfinger was already in the lobby of the Detroit Chamber of Commerce building doing a radio call-in program on his cell phone.

The sun would rise shortly thereafter.

But despite the hour, Gettelfinger is always an interesting person to interview, as he has his eye on all parts of the autos industry. And he didn’t disappoint this year, either.

After a year like this has been, there is a tendency to want to sit back a little and let all of the seismic events sink in. But Gettelfinger sees the real challenges to the autos industry to be down the road.

 (Click here to hear Ron Gettelfinger’s comments)

New technologies, new hiring patterns and new financings will all be the order of the day for the next 10 years. So while this has been a rough-and-tumble year, the fun hasn’t ended yet, he suspects.

The Reuters Autos Summit runs through Thursday in Detroit and Paris and features a global slate of guests from the big manufacturers, dealers and suppliers.

The U.S. government has pumped more than $100 billion into Detroit over the past year to keep automakers General Motors and Chrysler alive. But some of the sector’s remaining capitalists are having a hard time stomaching a $25 billion Department of Energy loan program intended to spark new developments in electric cars. 

Start-ups Fisker Automotive and Tesla Motors have won about $1 billion in combined funding, while longtime players Ford and Nissan have received substantially larger loans from Washington to work on vehicle electrification — a technology the White House and many in the industry hope will reduce the United States’ dependence on imported oil and lower emissions of carbon dioxide, a leading greenhouse gas. 

Funneling federal money to new entrants to the automaking world does not sit right with Tim Leuliette, chief executive of parts supplier Dura Automotive. 

“If there’s a real market for electric vehicles, the OEMs will do it,” Leuliette said, using industry jargon for automakers. “We don’t need to have people who have never built a car in their life take $1 billion of our tax money and say ‘I can do it too.’” 

Government funding muddles market signals, Leuliette argued at the Reuters Autos Summit in Detroit.

“When government writes a check, it says the smart money investors are hesitant to fund it,” Leuliette said. “When markets say it’s now wise enough … there’s more than enough money.” 

For his part, the founder of Fisker Automotive — which aims to build plug-in hybrid cars at a former GM plant in Wilmington, Delaware — said government funding is a logical way to kick start a technology that private U.S. companies have been slow to focus on. 

“Do we just sit and wait for the Chinese and the Japanese or Europeans to develop this and then we join later? Or do we actually this time around, try to take the lead?” said Henrik Fisker, whose plug-in hybrids would be able to travel for short distances on just the electricity stored in their batteries, which can be charged off the electric grid. 

“This is a moment in time, we cannot let this pass. We already let the hybrid pass - Toyota in the consumer’s mind, invented the hybrid and owns the hybrid - the average consumer doesn’t know that GM has more hybrids than Toyota,” Fisker said. “If an American company comes first with a plug-in hybrid, and we will be followed closely by the Chevy Volt in another segment, I think that is where America then has a chance in the consumer’s mind to take the lead, and not only in the U.S., but worldwide.”

Ed Whitacre sneaks off to breakfast at a Detroit greasy spoon. Sergio Marchionne’s attention to detail extends to the condition of his factories’ bathrooms. And Bill Ford helped save his great-grandfather’s company by hocking the blue oval. 

These are just a few of the glimmers of top Detroit auto executives’ lives that you get when you sit down with Ron Gettelfinger, head of the United Auto Workers union. 

Marchionne, the chief executive of Italian automaker Fiat — which pulled Chrysler out of bankruptcy this year, seems to be “extremely respectful” of his workforce, Gettelfinger told the Reuters Autos Summit in Detroit on Tuesday. 

“I know he’s went out into the facilities and one of the things that he did was walk into the restroom to inspect it. Now you don’t normally see that happen,” Gettelfinger said. “But he truly believes in the power of the people, the value they add to the process.” 

General Motors chairman Whitacre is also a fan of unannounced factory visits, a detail Gettelfinger may have picked up at one of their morning meetings. 

“There’s a little dive up the street that we go up here and have breakfast sometimes,” Gettelfinger said. 

He also recalled a call that came from then-Ford CEO Bill Ford three years ago, when the automaker was preparing a major debt offer — a move that helped it to be the only U.S. automaker to avoid bankruptcy this year. 

“I remember him very well calling me to say, ‘In case you hear anything, we think now is the time to go out into the market and build up some debt.’ And the term he used was ‘hock the blue oval,’” Gettelfinger recalled. 

That move, while painful at the time, was likely a major reason the company did not have to turn to Washington for a bailout as rivals GM and Chrysler did, Gettelfinger said.

“Ford went out and did it the hard way,” Gettelfinger said. “And I think that has resonated with the buying public.”

A few years ago, one of the guests at our annual Reuters Autos Summit — Tom Stallkamp from Ripplewood — pretty much stopped everyone dead in their tracks by predicting that auto sales in the United States was likely to fall to an obscenely low level of 14.5 million.

Those were the days.

Of course, Stallkamp was making that prediction at a time when U.S. car manufacturers were selling in the neighborhood of 16 to 17 million a year. If the number hits 14.5 million in 2010, people will be wild with enthusiasm as most now expect something in a range of 10 to 11 million.

That would be about flat to a little higher than sales this year.

On the first day of Reuters annual sojourn to Detroit for the Reuters Autos Summit, defining what the “new normal” is going to be for everything about the auto industry is much on everyone’s mind. What will happen with the big manufacturers, the dealerships, the suppliers.

It’s a lot to assess all at once.

Bob Carter, head of Toyota’s U.S. operations kicked things off for the summit by talking about what he sees for the coming year.

The Reuters Autos Summit runs through Thursday in Detroit and Paris. For an audio clip of Carter’s comments, please click this link (Toyota’s Bob Carter at the Reuters Autos Summit).

It turns out that advisers to ultra-rich aren’t always so flush themselves. So, what happens, if, say, you spend a day on your client’s fancy yacht, then go back to your own tiny dinghy?

It’s simpler, more elegant . . . or just smaller.

“It’s an awkward position you’re in when you’re dealing with high net worth individuals and families because even if you have a pretty nice lifestyle at home you go on a trip and visit three or four clients and you come home at the end of the day and say, ‘Wow, how do I suffer through this five bedroom house and four bathrooms, and woe is me,’” BNY Mellon Wealth Management Managing Director of Family Wealth Services Thomas Rogerson told the Reuters Global Wealth Management Summit in Boston.

“I think that advisors that work with high net worth families very often have to struggle with that issue,” he said.

Rogerson is a funny case. He, himself, is heir to a fortune. His great grandfather was president of Boston Safe Deposit and Trust, a Massachusetts state-chartered bank taken over by Mellon, and started the Boston Foundation and Rogerson Communities philanthropic organizations. But, the money is essentially gone.

“It’s gone, I’m sorry to say, or I wouldn’t be here. I’d be a client, I wouldn’t be the employee,” he quipped.

Trying to help his clients avoid a similar fate, he has all sorts of advice about improving family communication and focusing on wealth in terms of human, intellectual, and social capital before financial capital.

But, then again, Rogerson’s family’s case in point, there’s a lot of folk wisdom saying that the wealthy won’t always be the wealthy. Somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of wealth was created by the people who hold it, and it rarely lasts more than two or three generations, Rogerson said.

In the U.S., the phrase is ‘shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations;’ in India, it’s ‘peasant shoes to peasant shoes;’ China has ‘rice paddy to rice paddy,’ he said.

After a cool few months, the phones are heating up again for restructuring advisors. 

Michael Kramer, head of restructuring at Perella Weinberg Partners, told the Reuters Restructuring Summit that the calls he gets from possible clients aren’t quite as panicked as early this year. 

“I think the new inquiries are picking up today — not nearly the way they were at the beginning of the year, and the emotion behind the inquiry is a little bit different.

“At the beginning of the year, it was desperation. We are in real trouble. We have to do this. How are we going to deal with this? We are going to have problems next week. We are running out of capital.” 

“Today it’s much more, ‘We think we’re going to have a problem in the future and how do we deal with that?’” 

Some distressed companies looking for buyers may want to take solace in the fact that it looks to Kramer like there might be some interested buyers out there now.

He says they’ve been calling to, saying “We’re fine, we’re healthy, but we want to take advantage of the overall situation.”

(Reporting by Caroline Humer)

All week, we have been meeting real estate executives at Reuters Global Real Estate Summit who have discussed the many different areas of concern that have spread throughout the sector.

Some have spoken about deleveraging. Some have told us about the shrinking of values. Others have said it’s a confidence game — as in, there isn’t any.

But J. Allen Smith, chief executive of Prudential Real Estate Investors, brought it all together for us quite nicely.

In Smith’s view, the real estate universe is subject to a confluence of all the above-mentioned problems and a few others as well. He sees it as a unique time and does not see a rebound for some time.

It’s a daunting time to be in the industry, for sure, but at the end of his comments (which you can hear by clicking on the link below) he is starting to see a glimmer of hope here and there. After the past couple years, even a glimmer is a pretty welcome thing.

Smith was one of our featured speakers at this year’s summit, which continues through the end of this week. Reuters has exclusively interviewed guests in our offices including New York, London, Shanghai, Mumbai, Sydney and others this week.

For more on Smith’s comments, please click on the attached link right below:

Allen Smith, CEO, Prudential Real Estate Investors

Remember the good old days where — if you lived in the United States anyway — people would talk about “emerging markets”?

We’d nod our heads knowingly, wishing these poor folks the best as they tried to accumulate the swell things we had bought for ourselves. We knew that residents of Mumbai or Caracas or somewhere would never attain the great things we had in such abundance here in the good old USA (Hummers; his and hers monogrammed dishtowels; zero down, 110% mortgages on houses we couldn’t afford … that kind of stuff), but we still wished them well.

So, here we are in 2009 and at this year’s Reuters Global Real Estate Summit we find that the new emerging market is … well, it’s right down the block.

According to our guest Tom Shapiro, president of GoldenTree InSite Partners private equity investment firm, the new emerging market in the real estate world is the United States.

Shapiro, in a lively discussion, spoke glowingly about his firm’s recent new business in Brazil and about other opportunities he was seeing outside the United States. But, while he said his firm had not made any investment in the U.S. in about two years, he was starting to look for opportunities and see some enthusiasm for deals to get done.

Shapiro said it was still to early to decide what inning the real estate meltdown was in, but he was starting to see some interest from the sidelines about what the “next big thing” would be — and with cities like New York, San Francisco and Boston as potential growth engines, he was a little hopeful.

Optimism this week has been pretty thin in the real estate world, so we need to take it where we can get it.

Shapiro was one of the featured speakers at this year’s global summit, which continues through the end of this week in New York, London, Shanghai and Kuala Lumpur.

For more of Shapiro’s comments, please click the link below and hear an audio clip:

Tom Shapiro, GoldenTree InSite

Everyone likes to set records. Think about those two giant twins who felt the need to ride motorcycles for their Guinness Book of World Records picture. What were those guys thinking?

Well, after many Reuters Summits, it seemed we set a record on Monday for the use of the word “crap” in one session.

It’s not a particularly glorious achievement, of course, but when thinking about the state of the real estate industry these past few years the words could have been a lot more nasty.

At the Reuters Real Estate Summit today, Richard Jones, partner at the Dechert LLP law firm and co-chair of the firm’s real estate group, spoke about the kinds of deals that will have to get done to help get the ball rolling on the many restructurings that need to be completed industry-wide in the next few years.

As there are a great number of troubled loans out there, the question of what happens to the worst of them (jokingly granted an effluent-style nickname). Jones, who advises clients on almost every side of an available real estate transaction, gave a good sense of exactly what will have to happen to start seeing the market swing back into action.

Jones was one of the featured speakers at this year’s summit, whch continues through this week around the globe. Reuters will be welcoming guests to centers including New York, London, Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur and Sydney.

For a chance to listen to Jones’ thoughts, please click on the link below:

Richard Jones, Dechert LLC