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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alighieri who wrote (562126)	4/21/2010 11:15:15 AM
From: longnshort	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576831

By TBlumer on Taxes & Government BIZZY BLOG From GM's Ed Whitacre in the Wall Street Journal: >>>The GM Bailout: Paid Back in Full The investment of U.S. and Canadian tax dollars worked.<<< No Ed. The government ripped off disfavored creditors and dumped something like $45 billion into new GM stock. It then "cleverly" lent your company far, far more than it needed to get going after walking away from tens of billions of dollars in debt bankruptcy. Now we're supposed to be impressed that your company paid back a bunch of money that has been parked doing almost nothing (except creating smaller reported losses, thanks to interest) since it emerged from bankruptcy. Big freakin' deal. ________________________________________________ UPDATE: No true accounting for the cost of the GM government bailout is complete without taking GMAC into account, and the government in essence admits to that fact: >>>GMAC was treated more like banks that received bailouts without having to explain what they were doing with the money, the report says. The report was released Thursday by the Congressional Oversight Panel overseeing the $700 billion financial bailout that Congress passed in October 2008. "Treasury missed many opportunities to improve accountability and protect taxpayer money," panel chair Elizabeth Warren said in a conference call with reporters. She said Treasury didn't make GMAC show how it would return the taxpayer money, or how the investment would increase credit to consumers. "These decisions mean that Treasury is now struggling to deal with a GMAC that is not financially rehabilitated, Treasury has no exit strategy and taxpayers are not fully protected," Warren said. The Treasury Department responded by reiterating that backing GMAC was necessary to preserve dealer financing for GM. It disputed the report's core finding, that alternative approaches might have saved taxpayer money and provided better transparency.

To: Alighieri who wrote (562126)	4/21/2010 11:27:41 AM
From: i-node	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 1576831

>> What will you say when they show a profit? My response here will undoubtedly be over your head. However, I'll do it anyway. GM may well become profitable again. But any such developed is certain to be short-lived, as they have the massive overhead of unions which will prevent them from competing in world markets. The fact is that a company with higher labor costs is always going to be at a substantial disadvantage in a global market. A return to profitability on a temporary basis is not unexpected; after all, a reasonably forecastable return to profitability is a precondition for emergence from Chapter 11. Remember, however, that this corrupt bankruptcy process had GM come out of Chapter 11 with a mere 2B in LTD and with all previous shareholder equity eradicated -- an outcome that would NOT have happened under a normal bankruptcy process. Given the advantages the company was handed by a government's designation of GM being too big to fail, a return to profitability is the very least one can expect. But it doesn't help America that one of our two automakers is on government life support and likely will remain so for an extended period of time, if not forever.