The governments of Canada and the Canadian province of Ontario pledged another US$9.5 billion in aid to GM's restructuring, in exchange for a 12.5-percent stake in the new GM. In Germany on Sunday, the government agreed to lend Opel, GM's European subsidiary, 2.1 billion dollars, to pave the way for the acquisition of the company by Magna International Inc., a Canadian auto parts supplier.

President Obama thanked both the German and Canadian governments for their support to the US auto industry.

For some ordinary Americans, the downfall of GM, long regarded as an icon of American dream and a cradle of middle class, seems to be hard to accept.

"It's sad. It's very very sad," said Bob Dewar, one of the baby-boomer generation and one of those who migrated to Detroit in the 1970s for a better life. "The American dream is gone."

But Shusheng Wang, co-director of Global Trade Group at Detroit-based Butzel Long law firm, told Xinhua that he believes GM will benefit from the bankruptcy in the long term.

"GM will shed the bulk of its liabilities, and it will become cost competitive against Japanese transplants under the deal with the union. Even better is that the government will finance the company through bankruptcy," said Wang, who had worked at GM headquarters as a legal counselor for nearly 10 years until 2006.

Topping world auto sales for 77 consecutive years until 2007 and owning internationally-famed brands like Buick, Cadillac and Chevrolet, GM, along with Chrysler and Ford Motor Co. in the so-called Detroit Three, has kept losing ground to its Asian and European competitors due to its over-dependence on powerful, oil-guzzling trucks and sport utility vehicles (SUVs), poor cost management and lax quality control.

Its US market share has plunged from more than 50 percent at its peak time to a barely 20 percent, and it has lost US$82 billion in the past four years.

The ongoing global financial crisis, triggered by the US mortgage meltdown, turned out to be the last straw for the mammoth company, whose final struggles with government bailout support proved futile in the face of a severe credit crunch on the financial market and a 35-percent drop in new cars demand in the United States since last October.

Public began losing confidence in GM. Its shares dropped to 75 cents as close of Friday, the lowest level in 76 years, and less than the 1-dollar minimum price normally needed for a New York Stock Exchange listing. The long-term blue chip was kicked out of Dow Jones Industrial Average right after its bankruptcy filing on Monday, with networking giant Cisco Systems taking its place.

However, industry experts pointed out that the Monday bankruptcy might have opened a new chapter for the aging GM, founded in 1908, and the company stands a chance to reemerge as an industry leader if it can well adapt itself to the new challenges faced by the global auto sector.

Amid growing concerns about soaring oil prices and dire consequences of climate change, the Obama administration on May 19unveiled tough standards for tailpipe emissions from new automobiles to be sold in the United States, while also raising the auto fuel efficiency targets.

In his Monday statement, Obama said that GM has prepared a "viable and achievable" plan to rise again, and expressed his confidence that the new GM will be able to produce "high-quality, safe and fuel-efficient cars of tomorrow."

And GM has started preparing for such a comeback even before it enters the courtroom. It has recently introduced Chevrolet Volt, an all-electric plug-in compact car dubbed the company's "new DNA "that "represents a fundamental reinvention of the American automobile industry." It has also confirmed the production of low-emission Ecotec engines at its joint venture in China, which will be mounted on the newly-launched Chevrolet Cruze compact sedan, another fuel-efficient model.

On Friday, the company announced a plan to utilize an idled US assembly line to manufacture small cars. And it plans to sell about 17,300 China-made compact cars in the United States in 2011 and to triple that to about 51,500 in 2014.

"I am absolutely confident that if well managed, a new GM will emerge that can ... out compete automakers around the world and that can once again be an integral part of America's economic future," Obama said on Monday.

And hopefully he has said it right, because analysts believe that if GM fails again, it will not only drag the US government into deeper deficits and a far steeper decline in Treasury bond prices, but also take toll on the urgently-needed recovery of the US economy.

(Xinhua News Agency June 2, 2009)