November 7th, 2007
I just noticed an Internet headline indicating the General Motors has posted a $39 billion loss for the last quarter. Whoa, thought I. You really have to work pretty hard to lose that much money in one fiscal quarter!
Well, just how hard do you have to work? There were 92 calendar days in the third quarter — so that works out to a loss of $423,913,043 every day.
And according to the GM “company profile” web page, the company currently has 284,000 employees. So a little more arithmetic tells us that the company sustained a loss of $1,492.65 per day for each employee.
Something tells me that you could have just given each GM employee $1,000 per day, and told them to stay home. Then you could turn off the lights, shut down the assembly lines, and still saved a lot of money.
I know … it’s a ridiculous idea. But managing to lose $39 billion in a three-month period is pretty ridiculous too …
