The Last Stock

In 1988, General Motors built the best Pontiac Fiero it had ever made — a reported $30 million suspension, real mid-engine handling, the car its engineers had wanted from the start — and then shut down the factory that built it, in the same model year.

Most people blame the Corvette, or the engine fires. The real reason is quieter. The Fiero shared its Michigan plant with one other planned car, the GM-80 Camaro and Firebird. When GM canceled the GM-80 in 1986, the Fiero was left alone in a factory built for ten times its sales — and chairman Roger Smith was already closing under-used plants for Wall Street.

Saturn is remembered as the car company General Motors built and then neglected — but the stranger fact is that Saturn was the GM brand that was supposed to survive the 2009 bankruptcy. It had a buyer: Roger Penske, who agreed to take the brand, roughly 350 dealerships, and about 13,000 jobs. The deal was days from closing. Then Renault's executive board in Paris rejected the vehicle supply agreement the whole rescue depended on, and GM announced the shutdown the same day.

The starvation came first, though. Thirteen years on one platform. A 1994 bonus gap — $3,245 for Spring Hill workers, $550 for the rest of GM's hourly workforce — that turned Saturn's success into an internal provocation. The full autopsy:

In 2010, Ford posted a $6.6 billion profit — its best year since 1999. The same year, it killed Mercury.

No bankruptcy. No bailout. No crisis.

While General Motors needed the largest industrial bankruptcy in American history, plus a clause of federal bankruptcy law, to put down Pontiac, Saturn, and Hummer, Ford ended a 71-year-old brand with a business review and a press release. The money went to Lincoln. The dealers — well over a thousand Lincoln-Mercury stores, none of them Mercury-only — and the owners, some on their sixth consecutive Mercury, absorbed the cost. The last Grand Marquis rolled off the line on January 4, 2011. No farewell edition.

A quarter of Eastern Air Lines belonged to its own workers, through a profit-sharing arrangement built up over years of paycheck deductions. When the airline died in January 1991, that stake was worth nothing.

The story most obituaries skipped is what Frank Lorenzo's Texas Air Corporation moved out of Eastern between 1986 and 1989. The System One reservation network — independently valued between $200 and $400 million — sold to a Texas Air subsidiary for $100 million, then partly resold for more than that. Wide-body jets that Eastern had ordered for its own routes, quietly flying for Continental. Gates, slots, Latin American routes, all drifting into the Texas Air empire at prices set by the man who owned both airlines.

By June 1988, the federal Department of Transportation was investigating whether Texas Air was even fit to run an airline, citing the asset transfers by name. It was the corporate-raider playbook in one of its earliest documented forms.

Watch the full documentary breakdown:

There are 235 dead Sears stores across America. The signs are still up. The doors are locked. And the buildings underneath them haven't belonged to Sears for over a decade.

Most people blame Amazon. The real story is a single transaction in the summer of 2015, when hedge fund manager Eddie Lampert — who controlled Sears as both its largest shareholder and its largest creditor — transferred 235 of the company's best store locations to a real estate trust called Seritage for $2.7 billion. Buried in the lease was a clause that let the new landlord take the buildings back, 50% at a time, and re-lease them at four times the rent.

Five months later, Warren Buffett bought a personal stake in Seritage. He didn't buy Sears. He bought the buildings.

Full breakdown here:

Longer written version on Medium:

Aaron Montgomery Ward founded his mail-order catalog company in Chicago in 1872. The business survived the Panic of 1893, the Great Depression, two world wars, the postwar suburban boom, and the slow contraction of catalog retail. 128 years.

GE Capital — the financial-services subsidiary of General Electric — held controlling interest in Montgomery Ward through a holding entity called Mobile Acquisition Corp. On December 28, 2000, three days after Christmas, GE Capital decided Montgomery Ward wasn't worth saving. By April 2001, every one of the company's roughly 250 stores was liquidated. 37,000 employees lost their jobs. Approximately $1 billion in debt was absorbed onto GE Capital's books.

The largest department-store liquidation in American history happened in four months — because a financial-services subsidiary decided the retail line item was no longer the most profitable use of the conglomerate's capital.