For several years in a row, GM's favorite deus ex trick to "boost" sales and fool most of the people all of the time, also happened to be the oldest: channel stuffing. As we showed previously, as recently as year ago, GM had some 800,000 vehicles parked on dealer lots [9].
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Eventually, GM got enough questions from outside sources (here [10] and here [11]), to where it was forced to taper its aggressive channel stuffing only to find a second "deus ex" - subprime loans. This lasted for a little over a year before none other than the government itself yanked the subprime bubble from under the car-makers in the second half of 2014 [12], leading companies such as Goldman to admit "subprime was responsible" [13]for the subsequent collapse in auto sales.
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So with both channel stuffing and subprime out of the window if only for the time being, GM, whose China sales are falling off a cliff, had to come up with some urgent source of end demand. A source which we would not have been aware of at all had outside pressure not once again forced GM to start breaking down its sales by customer type less than a year ago, in June 2014. Which sadly means that we barely have 10 months of data.
However, the 10 months may be enough: they show that "once a Government Motors, always a Government Motors", and in just the first quarter of 2015, the average annual increase in sales to Uncle Sam, aka the Government was a whopping 24%, roughly about 100% higher than GM's headline rate of sales increase!
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So what's next: your friendly postman delivering your mail in a white and blue Escalade?
One wonders: just how much in actual revenue does GM make courtesy of the Obama administration whose actions previously singlehandedly prevented a once bankrupt GM from liquidating, and why are US government workers in an apparent need of brand new GM vehicles every single month?
Finally, if Obama is directly paying GM as an end client, how many billions in "sales" is the Government responsible for with other brand retailers: such as Amazon, IBM and of course, Apple? Because everyone knows that all those DMV workers are in dire need of the latest and greatest taxpayer funded iPhone 6...
