Michigan is sad. I hear about it everyday from the family and friends I have who still live there. “It’s a sad day for Michigan,” my mother says nearly every time she calls. “But the weather is nice today,” she concedes. Michigan is sad, as is the country, after GM’s collapse. Indeed, we should not downplay the significance of GM’s apparently ineluctable filing of Chapter 11 bankruptcy on 1 June 2009 - more than a century after GM’s founding on 27 September 1908. It comes as an unsurprising but hard-to-swallow finale to a decades-long decline in market share and profits. Unfortunately, the predictability of GM’s demise, or a comprehensive understanding of why it occurred, does little to soften the blows endured by manufacturers, auto workers and Americans in general as a result of GM’s fall and ultimate collapse.

Just what does this mean for the U.S. economy, already saddled with the collapse of Lehman Brothers and burgeoning government debts? The negative affect of the ensuing layoffs will take time to reveal itself as the loss of industry spreads from its epicenter in Detroit, but when put in the context of the entire U.S. industry sector certain indicators suggest that the actual impact of the GM collapse may not be commensurate with its symbolic impact as a face of industry.