Snow Business

Deep in Fantasyland: White House touts GM loan repayment:

. . . the White House is trumpeting the news. Here's a blog post by chief White House economic adviser Larry Summers:

What a difference a year makes. Just about a year ago, the American auto industry was on the brink of collapse. Today, General Motors announced that it has repaid its $6.7 billion loan to the U.S. government in full five years ahead of schedule . . .

However, a more independent opinion comes from the man the Democrats appointed to oversee TARP, Neil Barofsky. A Google search of the topic brought me to Grassley Slams GM, Administration Over Loans Repaid With Bailout Money. Leaving the politics out of it, here is the meat:

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."

A financial adviser named Nick Massey has a long, more thorough shredding of the Summers point of view in Don’t believe the hype on GM’s loan. repayment.

As with the heroic takeover of the alleged "city" of Marja, Afghanistan (really a collection of mud compounds), the shell game with Fannie/Freddie losses magically being transmuted like lead into gold of economic recovery, and the almost uncountable number of false statements made attendant to health care "reform", so with GM. As Hitler sings in "The Producers", with this administration (and a number of predecessors):

All you need to know is,
Everything is show biz.

But to paraphrase an even greater American than Melvin Kaminsky (AKA Mel Brooks), you can't snow all of the people all of the time.

After the disgraceful misdeeds and non-deeds of the Bush administration and the Fed attendant to the Great Financial Crisis, the public expected that the sober-sounding Barack Obama would immediately institute sound financial policies and make the perps pay. Instead we got the Bushbama Continuity of bailouts and money-printing and over a year after inauguration, a speculative stock market fueled by zero interest rates to savers, the return of leverage and omigosh, a sop to the peasants- a civil action against the whipping boy du jour by the Sex and Exchange Commission. Said civil action coincidentally announced on an options expiration Friday at the same time the news that the SEC under Presidents Clinton and Bush had ignored the Allen Stanford matter until post-Madoff it could ignore it no longer.

Don't believe anything anymore unless you read it in an independent blog.

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