General Motors' demise has been a long time coming. On Monday, it expired as a private, solvent company with a bankruptcy filing that embodies not just a sequence of failures by what was once the world's largest company; not just the challenges of a car industry in crisis; but a mismanaged economic and social transformation.
The basic facts of GM's predicament are well known: the recession killed a company bled to anaemia by its incapacity to make cars people would buy. While the recession has run the whole car industry over a cliff – total capacity is 86 million vehicles a year, but annualised global sales have fallen to 56 million from 70 million in 2007 – some producers are suffering more than others. For this they have themselves to blame. GM's primacy in the US guaranteed its global dominance after the second world war. Market power bred complacency, and GM's US market share declined steadily from more than half to about 20 per cent.
Japanese “transplants”, more efficient than the Big Three and unburdened by commitments to unions, built a lean car industry across the south. We should not lament this: median household income in Michigan is some $10,000 per year higher than in Alabama. Flint's loss is Huntsville's gain.