Oh dear, oh dear. The outraged splash headline on the Huffington Post at the moment (“aggregated” from an original news source, as is its wont) is: “New GM Chairman: I don’t know anything about cars”. Inside, the site huffs and puffs about how extraordinary this statement supposedly is:

No experience is necessary to take the top spot at the bankrupt icon of Detroit’s automobile industry. Read more

As someone who generally believes in the separation of the chairman and chief executive roles at the top of big companies, I am encouraged by the emergence of Ed Whitacre, the former chairman and chief executive of AT&T, as chairman of the new General Motors.

The New GM board clearly needs to do a better job of management oversight than the old one did, since it took the US government to force GM into the kind of restructuring and slimming-down it had long needed to undertake. The old board was a very poor guardian of shareholders’ interests. Read more

Tony Jackson makes an interesting, and a bit scary, point about New General Motors, the part of the company that is supposed to spring out of Chapter 11 with its liabilities trimmed, ready to take on competitors in the auto industry.

Although New GM will have dealt with its healthcare liabilities, it will have the GM pension fund attached. He posits that this was because transferring it to the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation would have been too bitter a political pill. Read more

Further to my column on General Motors, I wonder whether the US government’s bail-out of Detroit is fated to go the same way as that of Wall Street. The White House wants to keep out of day-to-day decision-making in companies, but Congress is another matter.

As the FT reports, the Senate commerce committee is already weighing in with pressure on GM and Chrysler to amend their plans to close local dealers. This is a long-running sore with Detroit, since dealers were protected (before Chapter 11) by state laws: Read more