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June 4, 2009
size='3'>Autos
GM and Chrysler Defend
Dealer Closings to Senate Panel
Under sharp questioning from the Senate Commerce
Committee, executives from General Motors and Chrysler defended their
plans to whittle down the number of dealerships yesterday, calling it a
painful but necessary part of creating leaner, more competitive
companies, the New York Times reported today.
GM CEO Fritz Henderson and Chrysler vice chairman James E. Press said
that dealerships that sold a smaller number of vehicles weighed down
their companies and that a more streamlined corps of dealers was vital
for survival. Lawmakers from across the ideological spectrum, often
citing dealerships marked for closing in their home states, questioned
why some profitable franchises would not be allowed to stay open. The
members of the Senate panel also pressed Henderson and Press about what
they saw as an unreasonable timetable for shutting the dealerships.
Chrysler plans to close about 800 dealerships next week, less than a
month after informing franchise owners of those plans. GM hopes to
reduce its dealerships to about 3,500 by the end of next year from 6,000
now. The company told more than 1,000 dealerships recently that they had
until June 12 to accept a plan that would allow them to stay open until
October 2010, when their current agreements with GM expire.
href='http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/business/04dealers.html?ref=global&pagewanted=print'>Read
more.
Bankruptcies May Derail Auto Lawsuits
Plaintiffs in personal-injury and product-liability
lawsuits against Chrysler LLC and General Motors Corp. are pressing
members of Congress to ensure that their cases will be heard in court or
an alternate form of compensation is found, Bloomberg News reported
yesterday. Consumer groups are appealing a New York bankruptcy
court’s decision on Chrysler, saying that it relieves the new
company of responsibility for old losses. Plaintiffs and their families,
organized by the nonprofit, New York-based Center for Justice and
Democracy, are concerned that cases against GM may also be thrown out
and are seeking congressional action. Plaintiff’s lawyers in the
Chrysler case objected to the sale of the company’s assets because
“they may suspect that there won’t be any money left, even
if they were to win their cases,” said John Penn
of Haynes and Boone LLP. Lynn LoPucki,
a bankruptcy law professor at the University of
California at Los Angeles, says the New York court ruled that the
“new Chrysler doesn’t owe plaintiffs anything, but the old
Chrysler does and they are broke.”
href='http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a37t5JuRUejo#'>Read
more.
$70 Million Spansion,
Samsung Patent Deal Rebuffed
Bankruptcy Judge
face='Times
New
Roman' size='3'>Kevin J. Carey on Tuesday
rejected Spansion Inc.'s bid for authorization to enter into a patent
litigation settlement and licensing deal that called for Samsung
Electronics Co. Ltd. to pay Spansion $70 million,
face='Times New



Roman'>
face='Times
New
Roman' size='3'>Bankruptcy Law360 reported
yesterday. The deal was geared toward resolving three cases: an action
the debtors filed against Samsung with the U.S. International Trade
Commission in November 2008, a simultaneous patent infringement suit the
debtors brought against Samsung in the U.S. District Court for the
District of Delaware and a patent infringement suit Samsung filed in
2009 in Japan against a Japanese Spansion subsidiary. Judge Carey wrote
that he was unable to conclude that the settlement agreement was fair,
reasonable and in the best interest of the estate.
href='http://bankruptcy.law360.com/articles/104586'>Read
more. (Subscription required.)
PBGC Fights to Protect
Filene's Pension Plan
Concerned about the pension benefits of Filene’s
Basement Inc.’s employees, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.
(PBGC) on Tuesday asked a bankruptcy court to make sure that the
approaching sale of the retailer’s assets preserves pension
plan-related liabilities,
face='Times New Roman' size='3'>Bankruptcy Law360
size='3'>reported yesterday. The PBGC lodged a limited objection to the
proposed sale in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware
in order to prevent potential nondebtor members of Filene’s
controlled group from evading liability, should the agency take over the
plan. While the PBGC has not yet identified nondebtor controlled group
members, the agency entered the objection as a precaution to bar
potential members not in bankruptcy from escaping pension plan
obligations in the event of its termination, according to the
filing.
href='http://bankruptcy.law360.com/print_article/104497'>Read more.
(Subscription required.)
Lehman Pension Deal with
PBGC Is Approved by Court
A dispute between Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and
the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. over more than $1 billion in Lehman
retiree pension benefits came to an end yesterday, as Bankruptcy
Judge
size='3'>James M. Peck approved a settlement
that terminates Lehman’s pension obligations in exchange for a
$128 million payment,
face='Times New Roman' size='3'>Bankruptcy Law360
size='3'>reported yesterday. The settlement’s terms include the
PBGC to terminate Lehman’s plan, retroactively effective Dec. 12,
2008, and assume responsibility as statutory trustee for its 22,000
retirees in exchange for a $127.6 million payment from Lehman to cover
part of its underfunded obligations. The settlement also puts an end to
a suit filed by the PBGC in the U.S. District Court for the Southern
District of New York, which sought to terminate Lehman’s pension
plan. The insurer filed its suit in anticipation of a Dec. 22 bankruptcy
hearing on the sale of Lehman’s subsidiaries, hoping to make the
units pay for the plan’s unfunded benefits by ending the plan
prior to the sale.
href='http://bankruptcy.law360.com/articles/104679'>Read more.
(Subscription required.)
Derivatives
The new chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading
Commission will ask Congress today to impose substantial new costs and
restrictions on large banks and other financial institutions that deal
in the complex and largely unregulated financial instruments known as
derivatives, the
face='Times New Roman' size='3'>New York Times
size='3'>reported today. Gary G. Gensler, the top regulator for futures
trading, will provide significant new details of a plan announced three
weeks ago by the Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner. Gensler will
disclose his proposal before the Senate Agriculture Committee, which
oversees the commission. Lawmakers said they had been told that Gensler
would propose two sets of regulations — one set for the individual
dealers of derivatives and a second set for the marketplaces where the
instruments are traded.
href='http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/business/04regs.html?_r=1&ref=business&pagewanted=print'>Read
href='http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/business/04regs.html?_r=1&ref=business&pagewanted=print'>
The Securities and Exchange Commission is
investigating whether information about imminent stock upgrades and
downgrades was improperly used by employees at Lehman Brothers Holdings
and others, according to a letter released by Sen. Charles Grassley
(R-Iowa), the Wall Street Journal reported
today. The allegations were raised by Edward Parmigiani, a former Lehman
research analyst covering the semiconductor industry, and were contained
in an arbitration complaint about an employment dispute, according to
the letter from Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Finance
Committee, to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), Wall
Street's self-regulator. Grassley's office wrote the letter to FINRA
asking whether it had investigated the allegations.
href='http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124407330960583107.html#mod=testMod'>Read
more. (Subscription required.)
Future of Fannie, Freddie
Debated by House Panel
A long process of restructuring Fannie Mae and Freddie
Mac began yesterday in the House Financial Services Capital Markets
Subcommittee with most experts and members agreeing that nothing should
be done with the housing finance giants until the recession
eases,
size='3'>CongressDaily reported today.
Congress needs to consider what role the government-sponsored
enterprises, which were placed into Treasury Department conservatorship
last September to prevent a total collapse of the mortgage market, will
play in future markets, Subcommittee Chairman Paul Kanjorski (D-Pa.)
said. Among the options are reconstituting the GSEs to what they were
before the government takeover, splitting them into smaller operating
companies, regulating them like a utility, or revolving them back into
the government, he said.
Banks Try to Stiff-Arm New
Rule
The financial-services industry is taking steps to
delay an accounting rule that would force banks and others to bring some
of their off-balance-sheet vehicles back onto their books next year,
which could force some to raise additional capital, the
face='Times New Roman'>Wall
Street Journal reported today. A group known
as the 'Fair Value Coalition' that includes the Chamber of Commerce, the
Mortgage Bankers Association and the American Council of Life Insurers
and others sent a letter on June 1 to Treasury Secretary Timothy
Geithner regarding the off-balance-sheet accounting-rule change, saying
that it should be adopted 'cautiously and seek to minimize any chilling
effect on our frozen credit markets.' The group is trying to put the
brakes on the off-balance-sheet accounting measure, which would force
banks to bring hundreds of billions in assets back onto their balance
sheets at the beginning of 2010, effectively forcing them to set aside
more capital. The rule would apply to existing off-balance-sheet
entities, known as qualifying special-purpose entities, which were
generally used by banks to package and sell off to investors loans they
had made. Some banks have begun to estimate the impact on their balance
sheet of the new rule, including JPMorgan Chase & Co., which said
the rule would require it to consolidate $145 billion in assets when the
rule goes into effect. Analysts don't expect that the bank, one of the
healthiest in the industry, will need to raise capital because of the
shift.
href='http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124407146605483021.html#mod=testMod'>Read
more. (Subscription required.)
As Deficits Mount, Fed
Chief Calls for a Path to Fiscal Balance
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke testified
before Congress yesterday that the United States needed to develop a
plan to restore fiscal balance, even as the government builds huge
budget deficits as it tries to spend its way out of the worst economic
crisis since the Great Depression, the
face='Times
New
Roman' size='3'>New York Times reported today.
In remarks to the House Budget Committee, Bernanke said that the
government must address the immediate problems of a crippling recession
that has erased trillions of dollars in household wealth, hobbled
investment portfolios and raised unemployment to its highest levels in a
generation. “Unless we demonstrate a strong commitment to fiscal
sustainability in the longer term, we will have neither financial
stability nor healthy economic growth,” he said. The deficit is
expected to reach $1.8 trillion this year as the country spends
feverishly on financial bailouts, a sweeping stimulus package, lending
programs, rescues for the automobile industry and more. Those are the
highest budget deficit projections as a share of gross domestic product
since World War II.
href='http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/business/economy/04fed.html?ref=business&pagewanted=printhttp://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/business/economy/04fed.html?ref=business&pagewanted=print'>Read
more.
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