Go ahead. Make my car. (new link)
If the U.S. president told the bank holding your mortgage to cancel your debt and hand you the house free, it wouldn’t make you more productive or efficient. It just screwed someone you owed money to. And clearer than ever is that GM could have survived the Lehman episode with a simple bridge loan. America’s biggest auto maker could have returned to the slog without dishonoring billions of dollars in obligations to bondholders and other creditors.
But the most egregious aspect of the Obama bailout is its annexation of the auto sector to the administration’s green energy schemes. It’s no exaggeration to say the auto industry is being used to fulfill a throwaway line in an Obama speech calling for one million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.
February 9th?
Oh, I think I get it — Obama’s plan is always the technology of “tomorrow” — never functions for today.
Phew!, now we’re back to today.
Obama didn’t bail out GM . He used taxpayers money to bail out the UAW pension plan to payback the UAW for their election support.
There usd to be and Airline called Pam Am, a chain of stores called Eatons, and a Baseball team called the Brooklyn Dogers. They all went away and the world survived. There also should have been a car company called General Motors.
BTW – the link doesn’t seem to work.
1 million electric vehicles by 2015?
Do they know it’s already 2012?
absolutely true.
We may have missed an epic opportunity to see the sector reorganized – and de-unionized – but both the GOP and the DEMS prevented that from happening.
maybe in another ten years…
GM’s rot started in the 1970’s and needed years to turn around. The CEO of GM, Rick Wagoneer, had started the required reforms to GM’s pension funding and benefits funding several years before the 2008 financial crisis. He had also taken many of the tough decisions to drop poor performing lines and bring GM’s balance sheet and income statement into a solid position. If the crisis had hit in 2010 instead of 2008 GM would have been OK; battered & bruised but still solvent. GM simply ran out of time.
Ford had addressed the major issues before GM started addressing the issues and Ford had been much more aggressive than GM. In 2008, Ford was where GM would have been in 2010. Chrysler was a laggard and had barely started the required reforms to its business. Chrysler had experienced these sort of crisis very 12 to 15 years (early 1960’s, 1978/79, 1995). Dispite Lee Iaoccoco’s trumpeting of his brillance in 1979/80, Chrysler still did not have a solid cost accounting system or dealer sales forecast system. It still built far too many vehicles for the sales bank. Chrysler was hooped.
Kind of like the Lada being an extension of the Soviet government in every way including quality.
Kind of like the Lada being an extension of the Soviet government in every way including quality.
Posted by: Ken (Kulak)
Exactly. Bit like the old Soviet Premieres, you wont find Obama & his lackeys using a Volt.
I swear it is a joke, the “Volt.” Didn’t the fascists in national socialist Germany build a car for the “Volk”? These fascists just can’t keep their hands off the auto industry.
how to save detroit?
every greying boomer should get a pony (car)
Ah yes.
When you takes The King’s shilling
You does The King’s bidding.
“NPR is brought to you by Chevrolet – makers of the Chevy Volt” – heard yesterday on NPR. Never heard before on NPR that I know of.
The Leader’s Voltswaggon. ??
The East German Trabant comes to mind when I think of the Volt.
“1 million electric vehicles by 2015?
Do they know it’s already 2012?”
I will happily drive a”Volt” if the gubmint will give me one and pay the insurance.
Hey a freebie here,a freebie there,pretty soon you have your million cars on the road!
Oh,yeah,Mr.Prez,just as a further incentive,please fill the trunk with beer.
So they want to have a million electric cars on the road by 2015. What they’re not going to tow the ones with dead batteries?