An alarming sales drop in fourth-quarter has exposed General Motors Corporation (GM.N) to the shortage of cash and made it reliant on the government for financial assistance. This situation puts lots of concerns from investors’ side especially about the survival of GM.

The analysts are of the view that now the assessment of GM’s shares depends on the critical talks about its reorganization with autos task force and creditors call by U.S. President Barack Obama to cut liability and get new funds.

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A new bank bailout plan of nearly $1.5t has just been unveiled by the US Treasury Secretary timothy Geithner.

The plan has been designed to expand the size of a major Federal Reserve lending program from previous $200bn to $1 trillion.

Furthermore, the additional funding will also be used to develop a public-private investment fund of $500bn for absorbing toxic assets of the banks and it would be expanded to nearly $1 trillion.

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Microsoft is another big name going for job cut downs. It has announced the cut down of 5000 employees, out of which 1,400 are sent home on Thursday.

Rest of the employees will be going in the next 18 months. Spokesman Lou Gellos said, amongst these 1,400, 872 are from Puget Sound, the area where the company has its head quarters. The total numbers of employees with Microsoft are approximated to 96,000, and it is cutting down its 5 percent of workforce .

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BASF SE, the world renowned chemical company, is quite upset because of tough market conditions, as the worldwide recession hurts the company’s earnings for 2008-09 more than what it was expecting.

The company hasn’t estimated on this new outlook, but during November it dumped its target to go with the earnings of the previous year, when the company got 7.6billion euro pretax profit. BASF says that the company is considering shutting its 80 plants temporarily and would also restrict or stop production in some other plants.

BASF is quite well-known as a maker of paints, fertilizers and glues and also has business lines related to natural gas and oil production.

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According to a report worldwide oil demands will fall again during this year and it would be the first successive yearly declines in the past 26 years.

The International Energy Agency says that during this year, there will be an average 941, 0000 barrels per day decline in global oil demand.

IEA serves as the representative of the major oil consuming nations and it says that the said decline in oil demand is expected because of worldwide economic slowdown that seems to last throughout this year.

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The world’s biggest premium carmaker announced on Thursday that it would voluntarily recall more than 150,000 vehicles in North America because of a possible defect in the front passenger airbag seat sensor mat.

According to a company spokesman, this voluntary recall is because of the front passenger airbag seat sensor mat defect in some 2004-2006 models.

Almost 200,000 such vehicles were referred by the U.S. traffic safety regulators but the spokesman told that almost 50,000 of these vehicles had already received new mats that work properly.

“This problem definitely exists in the U.S and Canadian markets as these two countries required sensor to find if a baby or an adult was occupying the seat,” the spokesman further added.

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