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.”

The U.S. auto industry has had one heck of a year.

Sales have fallen off, credit has been pretty much nonexistant and two of the major U.S. automakers were bankrupt. Other that all that, things were fine.

But Bill Diehl, chief executive of advisory firm BBK, said at the first day of this year’s Reuters Autos Summit, that one of the main concerns for 2010 (if it’s not THE main concern) is the industry’s overall exposure to commercial real estate.

We have been hearing about the problems with commercial real estate in many other sectors of the U.S. economy and Diehl gave the strongest statement so far about the auto side.

(To hear Diehl\’s comments, please click here)

The Reuters Autos Summit continues through Thursday in Detroit and Paris.

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).

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)

Bank employees working in call centers and reminding clients of their overdue loans used to be as far to the bottom of the banking food chain as you could be. Not any more.

Raiffeisen International, the second-biggest lender in eastern Europe, has ramped up staff in its collections and risk management departments.

Active in 17 countries between the Czech Republic and Kazakhstan, it is exposed to a region that is among the hardest hit by the global financial crisis. Rampant loan growth of the last few years has turned into an equally rapid rise of bad debt.

“We substantially increased resources in our call centres, started new ones,“ Martin Gruell, Raiffeisen’s CFO, said ahead of the Reuters Central European Investment Summit in Vienna. “There are 40 percent more employees working in Collections than before the crisis.”

As it is struggling with the rising tide of non-performing loans – they more than doubled in the first half of the year – it has also shifted part of its pool for bonuses to those who are working on saving as much as possible of loans that have become overdue.

“Employees have targets and are getting bonuses depending on how much they are able to collect,” he said. Do they come at someone else’s expense? “Obviously, if there is not such a high demand on our salespeople, bonuses will be lower there.”

And Raiffeisen is feeling that its competitors are doing the same.

“You wouldn’t believe how hard it is these days to find good risk managers and to keep those that you have,” Gruell said. “This is now one of the most sexy jobs in banking.”

Even in the best of times, Japan has never been a cakewalk for foreign investors. But in the wake of the global credit crisis, the world’s second-largest economy can be downright baffling.

The recession has wiped out overseas demand for electronics and automobiles and sent a rush of mid-sized firms into bankruptcy.

Activist investors are increasingly on the retreat, citing corporate governance that some say is among the worst in the developed world. But even amid such a dour backdrop, there are still plenty of bright spots.

Most major Japanese companies have avoided massive losses on toxic assets. Faced with a shrinking market at home, those cash-rich firms are increasingly looking to move abroad. Outbound acquisitions hit a record of about $70 billion last year, and Tokyo firms are making aggressive moves into fast-growing Asia markets.

Bolstered by overseas investments, leading financial firms such as Mitsubishi UFJ and Sumitomo Mitsui are looking to become global players.

For the next two day, the Reuters Japan Investment Summit will focus on these and other issues facing one of the world’s most puzzling markets.

Through interviews with some of Japan’s most important influential executives, the Summit generate exclusive stories and investable insights.

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