The administration took a tragic situation and turned it into an expensive mess to pay a political debt. It wasted billions of dollars over many months delaying GM’s filing and then implicitly put itself on the hook for many billions more. The financial, political and social echoes of that decision will be with us for a long time. In short, they blew it.
--Michael Levine, Distinguished Research Scholar and Senior Lecturer, New York University, in the Financial Times
2 comments:
This is too true.
I can accept the political manuevering in the most recent bankruptcy/bailout. I don't like it, but this administration had no choice because of their ideology.
What I cannot understand is that we gave them billions last year knowing full-well that it was flushing money down the drain.
I thought Obama was a sure thing two-termer. It's still early, but I'm having my doubts . . .
They blew it only if the goal was to productively allocate capital with appropriate risk.
That was never the goal. The goal was to transfer billions of dollars to auto industry unions and possibly also to control the auto industry going forward.
If we meaure the outcomes of these two goals, the bailout was a whopping success.
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