So. Alea iacta est, as Julius Caesar might have said, if there had been a major Roman chariot manufacturer in putative need of nationalization. The nation's largest automaker, our most iconic firm, is bankrupt, GM and Citigroup exit the Dow in favor of Travelers and Cisco.

The first obvious thing to say is that the only alternative the US government probably had to this massively expensive reorganization was probably liquidation. I take seriously the claims that there was no DIP financing available for the automakers.

However. The reason there was no DIP financing available is, at least in part, that there's no obvious upside here. The government is acting as if GM's main problem is that it stubbornly refused to enter the lucrative market for small, fuel-efficient cars. But the market for small, fuel efficient cars is not lucrative--they're the cars with the thinnest margins. And no one's making it up on volume, either: at the height of last year's oil spike, when barrels of Brent Crude were being quoted in first-born sons, small cars soared to . . . 20% of the American market. Yes, there was a glut of SUVs, but that's because American companies were making a lot of SUVs. Foreign companies make money on small cars because they develop them for lucrative home markets before modifying them for American production.