President Obama is expected to issue an executive order to raise fuels standards for light trucks. Rather than wait for Congress to hash out the issue, Obama is using his executive power to raise the fuel efficiency standards and cut CO2 emissions by cars and light trucks beyond current requirements.

Issuing an executive order to raise fuel efficiency is easy; implementation is going to be the tough part. As General Motors, Ford (F) and Chrysler strive to implement new fuel efficiency standards, there are many tough decisions they will have to make.

The USA Today's DriveOn blog considers the possibility of what would appear to be the mother of all conspiracies: "Are the Obama administration and Rust Belt members of Congress taking political advantage of Toyota to bolster the fortunes of Detroit automakers?"

The blog post continues:

The unprecedented move to keep Toyota from selling models under recall could ve (sic) viewed as economic punishment, rather than consumer protection. Neither LaHood nor Toyota think that owners of cars covered by the recall should stop driving them. The cars may be too potentially dangerous to be sold, but they are fine to drive as long as you're aware of telltale warning signs that they may try to roar off on their own. Imagine a drug recall where the government stops sales in stores, but doesn't tell people to throw away the bottles in their medicine cabinets.

Former AT&T (T) head Ed Whitacre may be shaping up the new General Motors to be like the old monopolist SBC (that is, Southwestern Bell Communications for those keeping track). SBC became AT&T of course, as the old Ma Bell companies started combining back together years ago after two decades apart.

Whitacre, a tough CEO with thousands of people in his pocket, has now tapped two former AT&T colleagues as lobbyists in Washington to chew the fat with politicians over the future of the former automaking behemoth.

The bailouts of late 2008 and 2009 have cost the American taxpayers $61 billion, according to the Treasury Department, but the banks aren't to blame this time. The auto manufacturer bailout, which includes Chrysler and General Motors (GRM), has cost the country more than $30 billion, with American International Group (AIG) consuming another $30 billion.

Meanwhile, Bank of America (BAC) has already made good with the government, and several banks -- such as Capital One (COF), JP Morgan Chase (JPM) and TCF Financial (TCB) -- only have to clean up situations regarding the warrants they've issued. And interestingly, the losses from the bailouts on AIG and auto manufacturers are being offset by profits from the bank bailouts, which could generate additional funds of up to $19.5 billion.

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says if you see an offering today, you have to buy it.

Did you ever speak to Ed Whitacre when he was running Southwestern Bell? When he took that broken-up piece of Ma Bell and decided, single-handedly, that he was going to build it into a great national company with low costs and a motivated, lean management, and he wasn't going to let the unions stop him?

I did.

He was the best.

He was fierce and proud and was going to do whatever was necessary to rebuild the greatness of this once amazing company.

The announcement of General Motors CEO Fritz Henderson was surprising to most observers -- he'd only been in power since March and by most accounts, had been making progress in executing a turnaround.

What went wrong? The New York Times reports that "if G.M. was to truly reinvent itself - as the company promised in commercials after a government bailout helped it emerge from bankruptcy - the board decided that the 25-year veteran of G.M. was too tied to the company's past mistakes to bring a fresh approach that could help reverse its decades-long slide."

It looks like General Motors won't be unloading SAAB to Swedish company Koenigsegg Group, the automaker announced just a while ago. GM CEO Fritz Henderson expressed disappointment, saying "we're obviously very disappointed with the decision to pull out of the SAAB purchase... given the sudden change in direction, we will take the next several days to assess the situation and will advise on the next steps next week."

In a bit of corporate strategy that would make Bernie Madoff blush, General Motors plans to use bailout money to pay back the $6.7 billion loan it has from the government.

The rest of the $50 billion flushed into General Motors has been converted into equity, meaning it does not have to be paid back. The Wall Street Journal reports (subscription required) that "GM still has $13.4 billion in an escrow account that came from its U.S. bailout, or twice the amount it needs to pay the government back. While repaying the loan promises to further bolster the health of the company's balance sheet, it also locks up cash that could be used to fund operations if the U.S. economy continues to slump, or if GM cannot arrest a severe decline in its sales and market share."

"Treasury's own analysis suggests that the circumstances necessary for the companies to reach market capitalizations high enough for Treasury to fully recovery its equity investments are unlikely," a Government Accounting Office report on the taxpayer-funded bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler found.

The problem is this: In order for taxpayers on General Motors to be made whole, GM will have to hit a market capitalization of $66.9 billion.

The highest GM's market cap has ever been is $57 billion -- and that was in 2000, when circumstances were very, very different.

Mark LaNeve has been dismissed as General Motors' North American sales chief as the company looks to reverse a sales decline that has been driving tanking market share in the North American market. On a conference call with investors, CEO Fritz Henderson said that the company would "benefit from fresh perspective" on marketing in the United States.

For the third quarter of 2009, GM's US market share fell to 19.5% -- down from 22.1% in the prior year quarter.

While M&A is making a comeback, deal-making can still be tough. Just look at General Motors. By all accounts, it looked like its proposed deal to sell Saturn to Penske Automotive Group (NYSE: PAG) was all but done.

Not so. Yesterday, Penske backed out. The reason: the company thought it would not be able to supply cars after 2011 (when GM would stop production). As a result, Saturn plans to shutdown operations.

The past couple of months there has been a lot of news over the government's recent "cash for clunkers" program, which was wildly more successful than anyone could have imagined, but left dealer lots short on inventory. General Motors dealers are still dealing with low inventory and have requested more cars to meet recent demand.

According to the Detroit News, General Motors dealers have requested that the company ship as much as four times as many cars as the company had planned to build in October.

The General Motors' board is starting its two-day meeting today, and it is believed that the company is going to decide what will happen to the German Opel automobile unit. There are other topics to be discussed, including a new marketing campaign and preparation for a public offering of stock so the automaker can repay the U.S. taxpayers.

Nevertheless, the major news will be the company's decision about Opel -- what should General Motors do? Is it smart for the company to give up a portion of its market share in Europe in order to stabilize American sales? Reuters examined several scenarios General Motors might face.

Now that Cash For Clunkers is over, the auto industry has a problem: Where will car sales come from now?

Everyone who had an old car and wanted a new one took advantage of the Cash For Clunkers plan -- who is going to go buy a new car the day after the government stopped paying people $4,500 to buy cars?

J.D. Power and Associates reduced its 2010 sales forecast to 11.5 million units from 11.6 million -- citing the impact of Cash For Clunkers. In other words, a big part of what Cash For Clunkers did was borrow sales from the future and front-load them, and now there's nowhere to go for car sales now.

If you are one of the investors out there watching General Motors stock each day trying to pick the perfect time to buy the stock... don't! For whatever reason, people have continued to buy General Motors stock, despite the fact that the company and the government have issued warnings that the stock is destined to be worthless.

I read an interesting article that reported yesterday there were 12.6 million shares of General Motors traded. Maybe people do not realize that the company went into bankruptcy, or maybe they are just trying to profit off of traders that are not aware that this is not new General Motors stock, but the volumes are a bit curious.