US President Barack Obama said in an interview released on Saturday he was confident General Motors (GM) would thrive after restructuring, but made no mention whether the automaker might have to enter bankruptcy to complete reorganization.
Obama, in an interview with the C-SPAN cable television network, said he wanted the government to get out of the auto business as soon as possible, and added if some auto jobs never returned, the government would work to ensure workers were retrained.
“Ultimately, I think that GM is going to be a strong company and we are going to be pulling out as soon as the economy recovers and they’ve completed their restructuring,” Obama said.
GM faces a government deadline on June 1 to complete a sweeping restructuring that analysts believe will require a bankruptcy to complete. Obama was not asked about a potential GM bankruptcy during the C-SPAN interview and did not raise the issue himself.
“My hope ... is that we will see both GM and Chrysler having emerged from this restructuring process leaner, meaner, more competitive with a set of product lines that appeal to consumers, good cars that are fuel-efficient and that look at the markets of tomorrow,” Obama told C-SPAN in the interview scheduled to air yesterday.
The US government steered Chrysler into bankruptcy on April 30. The Chrysler plan is to sell substantially all of its assets to a new company owned by Fiat, a Union Auto Workers health care trust and the US and Canadian governments.
Obama predicted a jump in auto sales once the US economy recovers from the recession because Americans are not buying enough vehicles to replace the ones that are being worn out.
“You are looking at a substantial market that is going to be available for US automakers if they’ve made some good decisions now, and if they are building the kinds of fuel-efficient, high-performance cars that American consumers are hungry for,” Obama said.
“I think GM and Chrysler can do that,” he said. “We’re confident that they can ... take advantage of that new market and actually be very profitable and thrive, but it means going through some pain now.”
Obama said he did not want the US government, which would hold a majority stake in GM under the company’s proposal, to remain in the car business for long.
“We want to get out of the business of helping auto companies as quickly as we can,” he said. “I have got more [than] enough to do without that.”
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained