Wealth & Money Quote by Robert Lutz

“Imminent GM bankruptcy was always fiction” is a deliberately combative sentence, built to reframe a reputational crisis as a manufactured story. Lutz isn’t arguing that GM had no problems; he’s arguing that the most consequential problem was narrative: once “bankruptcy” becomes a headline genre, it starts behaving like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Credit tightens, suppliers panic, customers hesitate, and the company’s real options narrow. Calling it “fiction” aims to move the debate from balance sheets to blame.

The choice of villains matters. “Wall Street and the media” is shorthand for two systems the public already suspects of feeding each other: finance turning anxiety into leverage, and journalism turning anxiety into clicks. Lutz’s subtext is populist and strategic at once. Populist, because it positions an iconic manufacturer as the victim of coastal elites. Strategic, because it suggests that GM’s fate was negotiable until external actors made it seem inevitable, which can soften accountability for management and redirect anger toward outsiders.

Contextually, this lands in the long shadow of the auto industry’s crisis era, when GM’s “too big to fail” status collided with years of missteps and a rapidly changing market. Lutz’s line works because it’s simple and cinematic: a story about storytellers. It’s also a defensive maneuver dressed as diagnosis, asking you to treat collapse not as consequence, but as a rumor with a body count.