All serious talk of a General Motors/Nissan/Renault deal should be over by now. It started when prominent GM shareholder Kirk Kerkorian figured out a way to replace CEO and chairman Rick Wagoner with Carlos Ghosn; Renault and Nissan would each match Kerkorian's near-10-percent stake in the automaker. The mere suggestion of it pushed GM stock prices up to the point Kerkorian could recoup a good deal of his paper losses on his holdings.
But when the full GM board, including Kerkorian confidant Jerome York, met to consider the issue, it rebuffed Kerkorian by placing Wagoner in charge of the alliance proposal committee. Wagoner then had dinner with Ghosn, said to include California (not Tennessee) wine, and by now the Nissan/Renault chief was reassuring the press he has no interest in Wagoner's job. Ghosn says alliances work better than mergers, by the way, because with an alliance, one automaker can't control the other.
Consensus now is that Ghosn's apparent willingness to consider the idea was mostly about Nissan buying shuttered GM plants ("We need more capacity in North America. Period," he said in an interview on CNBC), though skeptics doubt Ghosn would alert the United Auto Workers--an organization Nissan's North American plants have assiduously avoided--about his thinking. But Ghosn also knows the UAW isn't in a strong bargaining position: Closed plants mean no jobs for anyone.
At press time, GM was expected to announce improved second-quarter earnings, good for Wagoner's future, Kerkorian's stock value, and for killing alliance talks. Across town, Ford Motor Company had just announced a worse-than-expected second-quarter loss of $123 million. Chairman William Clay Ford Jr. responded by saying The Way Forward will be sped up. And in a statement that recalls Kim Jong Il trying to grab U.S. attention away from Iraq and Iran ("Look at me! I've got the bomb!"), Ford said the company wouldn't rule out an alliance of its own.