GM made $22.6 billion. We lost $10.6 billion
- Thread starter JamesL
- Start date
"Although GM has been very profitable since 2009, its stock price never rose to a level that let Treasury to recoup that investment."
I can't see a date on that article, but total BS. GM stock price passed the treasuries investment, and ipo price. G and co sold low. In fact, I do recall one of the new managers at a certain Nebraska conglomerate buying right when the Fed-Gov was selling... reminds me of when Georgre Soros shared how he and his buddy laughed at how the BOE-K was planning to -liquidate- just about exactly the same amount of pounds Soros was about to short.
Note - Nebraska conglomerate is my sarcasm for naming Berkshire Hathaway.
I can't see a date on that article, but total BS. GM stock price passed the treasuries investment, and ipo price. G and co sold low. In fact, I do recall one of the new managers at a certain Nebraska conglomerate buying right when the Fed-Gov was selling... reminds me of when Georgre Soros shared how he and his buddy laughed at how the BOE-K was planning to -liquidate- just about exactly the same amount of pounds Soros was about to short.
Note - Nebraska conglomerate is my sarcasm for naming Berkshire Hathaway.
But that's not what Piezoe told us!
I was wrong. We lost money on the GM bailout, as I noted in another thread. Quite a bit in fact. I would be still in favor of the bailout were we presented again with a similar situation, but in hindsight it might have been structured a little differently so as not to leave the government stuck with so much equity. The only way they could be bailed out was to come up with some kind of collateral. But i think the deal could have been better done from the standpoint of the taxpayer, i.e., the government... Sadly, we also lost on the Chrysler deal as well. But see my link to the ProPublica Accounting of the Entire TARP program in the thread entitled Where did the TARP money go? Looks at this point to be quite certain TARP will return an overall profit. And that makes sense to me in as much as nearly all the TARP money was paid out in the form of loans or asset purchases and the government's cost of capital, in this rare instance, was next to nothing (because it came via QE which leaves the Fed as the bond holder, and all net Fed profits flow back to Treasury! However the true cost will depend ultimately on how the Fed manages their balance sheet.)
One of the components that is often neglected in the simplistic analyses of TARP that one runs into is the cost of doing nothing and throwing hundreds of thousands out of work. That's a much more difficult and uncertain analysis, but it is nevertheless an essential component of the overall TARP picture.
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Who cares if TARP returned an overall profit? It blatantly picked winners and losers in an economy that is supposed to be capitalism - where the free market is supposed to decide and there are plenty of mechanisms to handle these situations. Additionally, the profits those companies made were never socialized, just the losses. Lastly, it's not the government's job to make business decisions or play the market with the intent to make profit. What's next? Government prop trading desks? Oops...too late.
Why don't we just consistently run TARP programs and socialize entire market sectors, letting the government decide which companies get to win and which others go out of business (dependent on whether they've contributed to the winning administration's campaign, of course). You know, like Argentina and Venezuela?
What could possibly go wrong?
And you claim to have libertarian beliefs...LOL!