G.M.’s Big Bankruptcy, by the Numbers

Measured by the size of its assets, General Motors’s Chapter 11 case isn’t the largest the nation has ever seen. That dubious honor belongs to the investment bank Lehman Brothers, which reported about $691 billion in assets when it collapsed into bankruptcy protection in mid-September.

Even excluding financial companies — which generally have bigger balance sheets than industrial companies — G.M. isn’t the reigning Chapter 11 heavyweight. The largest nonfinancial bankruptcy in United States history is that of WorldCom: when it filed in 2002, it reported about $104 billion in assets. (Many of those “assets” vanished, however, when WorldCom’s accounting fraud was straightened out.)

Nevertheless, G.M.’s reorganization will have its place in the record books.

With more than $82 billion in assets, G.M. on Monday became the largest industrial company to file for Chapter 11 protection. Its assets are more than double what Chrysler reported when it, G.M.’s smaller rival, filed for Chapter 11 protection in late April.

Other numbers give a broader sense of how huge and complicated G.M.’s case will be.

For example, G.M. reported total liabilities of $172.8 billion on Monday. That’s more than four times the $41 billion in debt that WorldCom reported in its Chapter 11 petition.

Or consider this: G.M. has about 235,000 employees, which is nearly 10 times the number of employees at Lehman when that company sought protection from creditors. G.M. also does business with nearly 6,100 G.M. dealers — an amount it hopes to prune in bankruptcy court — as well as 11,500 suppliers in North America.

The chart below, based on figures from BankruptcyData.com, shows how G.M.’s Chapter 11 case stacks up against some other big bankruptcies:

Source : DealBook