GM's deal erased many average Americans' savings

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By William Ehart

When people think of "bondholders," they imagine tycoons. J.P. Morgan. Warren Buffett. Even the fictional Gordon Gekko of "Wall Street" fame.

In fact, tens of thousands of the bondholders of General Motors Corp. are not rich at all — and never were, even before the value of their bonds collapsed in the months leading up to the giant automaker's bankruptcy filing.

Plenty of GM's bondholders are Wall Street types. Most of the company's $27 billion in private debt is held by investment firms. But many of those firms are actually managing the money of individual investors. And fully 20 percent of the bonds are owned personally by roughly 100,000 mom-and-pop investors across the country, according to Main Street Bondholders, a group organized to lobby on their behalf.

Paralegals, pilots, small-business owners and lots and lots of retirees have poured their life savings into the bonds of GM, once a blue-chip company so blue that it was considered safe for widows and orphans to own.

• THE BONDHOLDERS: Click here to view vignettes of eight GM bondholders.

There's David Tuckerman, 84, of Arlington, a retiree who lost nearly $20,000 of his dwindling retirement savings. Or David Talbot, a 24-year-old camp counselor from Bellingham, Wash., whose $5,000 gift of GM bonds from his grandfather is virtually gone. And Bill Zastrow, 58, a software executive and single father who lost nearly $240,000 in college and retirement savings.

They have one thing in common: They never thought this could happen to GM bonds.

No longer. GM bonds have been a declining investment for as long as the auto company has been in financial distress, which now has been years. Since last year alone, the value of the bonds has fallen from 80 cents on the dollar to as low as 5 cents in the week before GM's June 1 bankruptcy filing.

As a result, plenty of families down the street — and even the mechanic on the corner — have seen their savings shrink to the point of disappearing. GM bonds have been classified as "junk" since 2005.

Why any average investor would rely on bonds is hard to fathom, given their riskiness. Yet many middle-class Americans do. Some simply believed in the mighty GM — the world's largest automaker until last year — and put their money behind that belief. Others have strong emotional or employment ties to the company. All were seduced by the bonds' high income and the fact that bonds are safer than stocks.