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The Treasury Department is resisting a push by General Motors Co. to sell the government's entire stake in the automaker, the Wall Street Journal reported today. U.S. taxpayers kept the nation's largest automaker by sales afloat with a $50 billion bailout in 2009 and now own 26.5 percent of the Detroit company. But GM executives have grown increasingly frustrated with that ownership, and the stigma of being known as "Government Motors." Executives have said that the U.S.'s shadow is a drag on its reputation and hurts the company's ability to recruit talent because of pay restrictions. Earlier this summer, GM floated a plan with Treasury officials to repurchase 200 million of the roughly 500 million shares the U.S. holds in the automaker. Under the plan, Treasury would sell the remaining shares through a public stock offering. But Treasury officials are not interested in GM's offer at the current price and are not in a rush to offload shares. The biggest reason: A sale now would leave the government with a hefty loss on its investment.

Patriot Coal Corp., which filed for bankruptcy protection in July, said that it will cut production of steel-making coal by about 85,000 tons per month due to weak demand, Reuters reported on Friday. Patriot, which became the first U.S. coal producer to seek court protection since coal prices began to plummet, sold 1.4 million tons of met coal during January-March, which accounted for 22 percent of total sales. The output cut at three mine complexes in southern West Virginia will affect 250 employee and contractor positions, Patriot said. Patriot, which operates in 14 mine complexes, will cut production at its Kanawha Eagle, Rocklick and Wells mine complexes over 60 days.

Chrysler Group LLC dealers came away from a day-long company show led by CEO Sergio Marchionne in Las Vegas on Monday confident that they will be selling a lineup of more competitive cars and trucks over the next two years, Reuters reported yesterday. Marchionne and chiefs of brands including those of Chrysler's majority owner Fiat SpA, showed 66 different cars and truck model variations to be introduced by 2014, up from 29 shown two years ago at a similar dealer meeting in Orlando. At Orlando in 2010, Marchionne introduced the first wave of new models since the bankruptcy that have helped lead Chrysler to 29 consecutive months of year-on-year monthly sales gains and a rise of the U.S. market share this year to 11.1 percent from 8.9 percent at the end of 2009.

Despite the U.S. auto sector's resurgence, taxpayers are still owed $25 billion from GM and its former financing firm, the Washington Post reported today. The Treasury Department owns 500 million shares of GM, but the firm’s share price of $22.45 is half what it must be for taxpayers to be repaid. Ally Financial, formerly GM's financing arm, also owes about $12 billion to taxpayers. Chrysler, on the other hand, has repaid its loans in full.

The trustee liquidating MF Global Holdings Ltd's broker-dealer unit yesterday urged a bankruptcy judge to approve a settlement under which exchange regulator CME Group Inc. would return $160 million to the unit's estate, Reuters reported yesterday. Bankruptcy Judge Martin Glenn expressed no concerns at a hearing about MF Global's $160 million settlement, which has the support of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. No one else raised objections in court. Trustee James Giddens plans to allocate $130 million of the sum to commodity trader customers who lost money when the MF Global parent company went bankrupt, a controversial decision that had threatened to derail the settlement.

Grupo Mexico SAB's Asarco unit asked a U.S. judge to throw out the $219.5 million settlement of its Omaha, Nebraska, lead-contamination case, claiming that the true source of the pollution was concealed by a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency official who is under criminal investigation, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. Asarco, which filed the largest environmental bankruptcy case in U.S. history to resolve pollution at about 100 sites nationwide, was misled into paying a “grossly inflated’’ settlement amount to resolve an EPA claim that a company smelter contaminated the Omaha site, Asarco attorneys said yesterday in a court filing. For the past year, Asarco has accused Robert Feild, the EPA’s Omaha lead project coordinator, with leading an evidence-destruction campaign that hid an agency study indicating the Nebraska property was probably contaminated by lead paint peeling from old houses rather than Asarco smelter emissions.

As much as the General Motors Co. has toned up, CEO Dan Akerson and his lieutenants at the "new" GM say that they keep running into ghosts of the old GM that tumbled into bankruptcy in 2009, the wall Street Journal reported today. The global giant still has fragmented manufacturing operations that fail to capitalize on its global reach, and an antiquated system of financial accounting and internal scorekeeping reinforces divisions that rivals have successfully bridged. The famously slow GM bureaucracy—that 1980s-era CEO Roger B. Smith dubbed the "frozen middle"—lives on. Executives in Detroit say they face pushback from middle managers on decisions about everything from engines to pensions to office furniture. "The good thing about our bankruptcy is that it took only 39 days," said Akerson. "The bad news is that bankruptcy took only 39 days. If we had been there longer, people would have asked these questions and looked at these things." Akerson and his team—including product chief Mary Barra, North America chief Mark Reuss and marketing chief Joel Ewanick—cite progress in solving long-standing problems and say they have a vision in place for a more cohesive GM. But they acknowledge that communicating that vision and steering GM's bureaucracy toward it have proven more difficult than they expected.

The owners of New York's Alex Hotel and Flatotel are seeking bankruptcy protection as part of an agreement with lenders who in January won a foreclosure lawsuit for unpaid loans, Bloomberg News reported today. 205 East 45 LLC, the owner of east midtown Manhattan-located Alex Hotel, has $123 million in outstanding liabilities with the lenders group, according to its chapter 11 filing. EALC LLC, the owner of Flatotel in west midtown Manhattan, has $245 million in liabilities with the lenders, according to the filing.

Fitch Ratings said that the rate of U.S. high-yield defaults is likely in May to hit the highest level since October 2010 following two major bankruptcy filings this month, Dow Jones Newswires reported on Friday. The firm said that the recent bankruptcy filings of mortgage lender Residential Capital Corp. and aircraft maker Hawker Beechcraft Inc. will add $3.4 billion to the April year-to-date default tally of $5.8 billion, putting the default rate on track to top 2 percent in May. Noting the pace of defaults this year is running ahead of last year's activity, Fitch said on Friday that the count of defaulted issuers now stands at 16, more than double the level seen at the same point last year. It added that the par value of bonds affected by defaults is up even more substantially, totaling $9.2 billion thus far this year versus $1.7 billion in 2011.

Ailing U.S. law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf is considering a bankruptcy filing as new debtholders take a more aggressive track, shifting away from earlier attempts at an out-of-court liquidation, Reuters reported on Friday. The majority of Dewey's partners have quit as a result of concerns about compensation, and $225 million in bank loans and bond debt. Buyers of distressed debt who have acquired Dewey's debt at a discount on the secondary market are more open to seeing the firm wound down in bankruptcy court rather than out of it. With the emergence of new creditors, Dewey on Tuesday replaced restructuring adviser Development Specialists Inc. (DSI) with competitor Zolfo Cooper. Joff Mitchell, a senior managing director at Zolfo, is now Dewey's chief restructuring officer. Bill Brandt, chief executive of DSI, confirmed that his firm's involvement in the matter was coming to an end. "Our firm is transitioning out," Brandt said. "We've been replaced by Zolfo at the insistence of the debt holders. It now becomes a creditor-driven case."