Not surprisingly, General Motors topped off 2008 with some really bad numbers:
DETROIT — The automaker General Motors said Thursday that its cash reserves were down to razor-thin $14 billion at the end of 2008, a year when the industry’s worst sales slump in decades nearly forced the company into bankruptcy before the federal government gave it a lifeline.
G.M. lost $30.9 billion, or $53.32 a share, in 2008 and spent $19.2 billion of its cash reserves.
For the fourth quarter, it lost $9.6 billion, or $15.71 a share, as its global sales fell 26 percent. It spent $6.2 billion of its reserves — $2 billion a month — in the fourth quarter alone. The company has said in the past that it needed a minimum of $11 billion to $14 billion in reserves to finance operations.
In 2007, the company lost $43.3 billion, a record, mostly the result of a noncash accounting charge; it adjusted the figure higher by $4.6 billion on Thursday.
That’s $ 70 Billion in losses over two years.
