With its offer of employee discounts to the public, General Motors addressed its short-term woes: it had two months of robust sales and cleared out its bloated inventory. But the fire sale did not solve GM’s fundamental problems, which raises the question of whether this former bulwark of American industry faces the prospect of bankruptcy. Wall Street’s answer? Not anytime soon. The company is losing billions of dollars in what has been its core business — building and selling cars and trucks in the US. Further, its hundreds of thousands of retirees enjoy generous health care and pension benefits that are an increasingly costly burden as the company’s US business shrinks. In the first half of the year, GM lost $1.4 billion and exhausted more than $3 billion in cash. For the next two or three years, though, financial analysts and bond investors say they do not expect that GM will go bankrupt because it has too much cash on hand. Beyond that limited time, however, the company’s prospects are debatable, with much depending on how Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner, remakes the company’s North American operations. ‘‘Given the tremendous cash balances they have, we felt comfortable, but our comfort is fairly short-term,’’ said Mark Kiesel, an executive vice-president at the bond giant Pimco. Pimco invested in one-to two-year bonds from GM and Ford’s financing arms earlier this year. ‘‘The thing that would concern any investor about lending long-term is the health care and longer-term legacy costs,’’ he said. — NYT
