Rick Wagoner
Rick Wagoner
George Richard "Rick" Wagoner, Jr.is an American businessman and former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of General Motors. Wagoner resigned as Chairman and CEO at General Motors on March 29, 2009, at the request of the White House. The latter part of Wagoner's tenure as CEO of General Motors found him under heavy criticism as the market valuation of GM went down by more than 90% and the company lost more than $82 billion USD. This led to his being...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBusinessman
Date of Birth9 February 1953
CountryUnited States of America
Frankly, we've done it in the fairest and most cost-effective way we could do it,
If all you do is read the headlines, you may not have as constructive a view of the outlook as we believe you could have.
I have given no thought to anything but turning the business around, ... I wasn't brought up to run and hide when things get tough.
On Friday I was in Washington for a meeting with Administration officials. In the course of that meeting, they requested that I 'step aside' as CEO of GM, and so I have.
One of our biggest challenges is our lack of cost-competitiveness in the United States, which is due to our legacy costs, especially the ever-increasing burden of high health-care expenses, ... Addressing this challenge in a fair and equitable way requires close work with our union partners, in addition to our ongoing work with government and health-care providers. Gary is the ideal person to do this.
What I've seen around the world is if the regulatory desires are combined with things that affect consumer behavior - such as in Europe, they tax gasoline very heavily - you do get people to move to very fuel efficient cars; trade off bigger vs. smaller cars.
We know a lot about Daewoo. We think we understand what the value of Daewoo is to us. Our view on that will not be changed by or influenced by other people being interested in it. If somebody else comes and pays a whopper amount for it, more power to them.
We'll have to put our helmet on and take a few months of lower overall sales.
To make this happen, we need to bring down costs and build the necessary infrastructure -- and the best way to do that is by business and government working together.
We already have made some significant moves to improve our competitiveness in the long term. We need to do more - and we will.
The recent discovery of prior-year accounting errors has been extremely disappointing and embarrassing to all of us. Credibility is paramount, for GM as a company and for me personally.
We had a good hand and I think we overplayed it, ... We're not alone in that, by the way, and others are still playing that hand as they surpass us now in incentive programs.
We're not interested in a bailout, but we would like a chance to play on a level playing field.
This transaction will allow us to preserve our business relationship, while further building up GM's already significant liquidity position during this critical phase of our turnaround.