Death of a Czar

There will be one less czar in Washington. The Wall Street Journal and New York Times lead off their business coverage on Monday with news that President Obama will drop "the idea of appointing a single, powerful 'car czar' to oversee the revamping of General Motors and Chrysler and will instead keep the politically delicate task in the hands" of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Chairman of the National Economic Council Lawrence Summers. A major deadline looms tomorrow for GM and Chrysler as they try to prove their creditworthiness to the Obama administration and plead for billions more in federal loans. The newspapers say the decision to lend out what could be at least an additional $7 billion to the carmakers will now come down to Geithner and Summers. According to the WSJ, there has been much grousing in the auto industry over the delay in naming a car czar (or, in this case, scrapping the position altogether). "Without someone firmly in charge, the various stakeholders have not felt compelled to come to the bargaining table," the newspaper reported, citing sources.

As if Geithner didn't have enough pressure, you can now add the concerns of the G-7. A summit of the world's largest economies in Rome came to an end over the weekend, with finance chiefs urging Geithner to hurry up and fix the U.S. banking system, Bloomberg reports. Not only are the eyes of the world looking to the U.S. to stabilize; they're looking for a sensible plan to copy. "A concrete U.S. plan would have positive spillover effects on markets and economies elsewhere,” a chief economist at UniCredit MIB in London told the newswire. “They are also probably hoping Geithner unveils the magic formula, which they could then also adopt.”

There is more gloom from Asia this morning. Japan, the world's second-largest economy, reported its gross domestic product fell by 3.3 percent "as a slowdown in exports led to the worst performance in 35 years," the Financial Times reports. The fall in the Japanese economy "was three times as bad as that of the U.S. in the same quarter," the newspaper added. For the export-reliant economy, all the signs are there for a long road to recovery. "There’s no question that this is the worst recession in the postwar period,” Japan’s economic minister, Kaoru Yosano, was quoted in the NYT as saying. When broken down in annual terms, it appears the Japanese economy has fallen the furthest of all the G7 countries, the newspaper adds. The WSJ reports that "the data will put pressure on Japanese policy-makers to come up with steps to support the economy, but their arsenal of possible measures looks limited." The benchmark interest rates are already near zero, and fiscal hawks are worried about being too extravagant as the country has amassed the world's largest sovereign debt at 157 percent of GDP.

Could Mel Karmazin be on the way out at Sirius XM Radio? Creditors at the struggling satellite radio company are threatening to "seek the ouster" of the CEO if Sirius XM files for bankruptcy "instead of cutting a deal with an investor that would allow it to remain solvent," the WSJ reports. Some creditors believe the company shot itself in the foot by not immediately refinancing its debt in July (when capital was readily available) after Sirus' merger with XM. With credit lines now dried up, Sirius XM is in a race to refinance $227.5 million in debt before Tuesday or face bankruptcy, writes the Financial Times. Karmazin is looking for help from both Liberty Media's John Malone and EchoStar's Charlie Ergen.

Scandal-ridden Satyam Computer Services Ltd. is up for sale, the WSJ reports this morning. Engineering and construction firm Larsen & Toubro Ltd., which holds a 12 percent stake in Satyam, has expressed interest in buying the company, which was considered one of India's highfliers until its chairman, B. Ramalinga Raju, "admitted last month to cooking the books for several years, by methods including the creation of fictitious cash balances of more than $1 billion." The biggest hurdle facing any acquisition is the concern that Satyam may not have enough operating capital to limp into new ownership. That path became a little easier today when India’s stock market regulator said it will ease takeover rules for companies at which "the government replaces the board as part of a rescue plan," Bloomberg reports. Shares in Satyam jumped 9 percent on the news.

And, finally, can a slim guidebook known for pointing out bargain restaurants and hotels make sense of  the ballooning cost of health care? Nina Zagat, "the queen of eat-and-tell restaurant guides," the NYT writes, "is invading a new and even trickier reviewing niche: doctors." Zagat editors want patients covered by WellPoint’s Blue Cross plan to post reviews of their doctors and rate them in categories like trust and communication, the newspaper writes. Naturally, doctors on the plan are not pleased.