April 20 (Bloomberg) -- General Motors Co. repaid $5.8 billion to the U.S. Treasury and Export Development Canada, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Ed Whitacre wrote in the Wall Street Journal.And some financial boondoggle for that matter -- instead of a bailout, it was a profit-making deal for the US. Of course, the US still has a huge stake in banks, but Obama didn't negotiate THAT one.
The company is paying back the loans “in full, with interest, years ahead of schedule,” Whitacre said in an opinion article in the Wall Street Journal. The two governments hold a majority of the automaker’s equity, he said.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Some Power Grab THAT Turned Out To Be
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4 comments:
Are you sure you should be crowing about this?
You are aware where the money to repay the loans came from, aren't you?
Hmmmmm.... couldn't be Cash For Clunkers. That was a huge failure and the government never got the money to dealers. So I'll bite, where did it come from?
A top Senate Republican on Thursday accused the Obama administration of misleading taxpayers about General Motors' loan repayment, saying the struggling auto giant was only able to repay its bailout money by dipping into a separate pot of bailout money.
Sen. Chuck Grassley's charge was backed up by the inspector general for the bailout -- also known as the Trouble Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Watchdog Neil Barofsky told Fox News, as well as the Senate Finance Committee, that General Motors used bailout money to pay back the federal government.
"It appears to be nothing more than an elaborate TARP money shuffle," Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said in a letter Thursday to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
GM announced Wednesday that it had paid back the $8.1 billion in loans it received from the U.S. and Canadian governments. Of that, $6.7 billion went to the U.S. treasury.
But Grassley said in his letter that a Securities and Exchange Commission form filed by GM showed that $6.7 billion of the tens of billions the company received was sitting in an escrow account and available to be used for repayment. He called on Geithner to provide more information about why the company was allowed to use bailout money to repay bailout money, and how much of the remaining escrow money GM would be allowed to keep.
"The bottom line seems to be that the TARP loans were 'repaid' with other TARP funds in a Treasury escrow account. The TARP loans were not repaid from money GM is earning selling cars, as GM and the administration have claimed in their speeches, press releases and television commercials," he wrote.
Vice President Biden on Wednesday called the GM repayment a "huge accomplishment."
But Barofsky told Fox News that while it's "somewhat good news," there's a big catch.
"I think the one thing that a lot of people overlook with this is where they got the money to pay back the loan. And it isn't from earnings. ... It's actually from another pool of TARP money that they've already received," he said Wednesday. "I don't think we should exaggerate it too much. Remember that the source of this money is just other TARP money."
Barofsky told the Senate Finance Committee the same thing Tuesday, and said the main way for the federal government to earn money out of GM would be through "a liquidation of its ownership interest."
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/04/22/grassley-slams-gm-administration-loans-repaid-bailout-money/
Even though it comes via both Fox News AND a Republican politician, I can't dispute the facts about this one. You appear to be right, man with many names.
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