Hearing the new, more aggressive restructuring plan offered by General Motors reminds one of the scenario for mankind once offered by Woody Allen. “One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction.”

If – and it is a big if indeed – the plan achieves a workable solution without resorting to a Chapter 11 filing, the best that can be said is that shareholders face the former. Much of this depends on debtholders seeing a future GM worth betting on rather than seeing what they can recover from a GM in Chapter 11.

Under the plan, the union-run healthcare trust would exchange half the cash owed to it for shares, making it a substantial shareholder in a restructured enterprise. GM's scheme also assumes another $11.6bn in cash from the US Treasury. In addition to the $15.4bn of loans already received, part of this would be retired in exchange for half the carmaker's equity.