Who cooked up this absurd advertising campaign crowing about General Motor’s lies that it paid back its taxpayer-funded loans “in full and ahead of schedule”? When I first saw the GM Ed Whitacre ad, I instantly knew this had to be some kind of trick. (GM Repaid Government Loan Ahead of Schedule). He strides toward the camera with a phony cheery optimism thanking the American public for giving them a “second chance”. I don’t recall choosing to give GM a “second chance”, do you? What I remember is Henry Paulson, George Bush and Timothy Geithner allocating funds from the bank TARP fund to “bailout” GM. New “private” equity chief, Barack Obama, was quite happy to keep the program going and assigned oversight to new Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.
GM was already a dead company walking years before they seized on the TARP opportunity. Even during the height of the economy they were hemorrhaging money. In the four years beginning in 2005 and ending in 2008, General Motors lost $10 billion, $2 billion, $39 billion, and $30 billion, respectively, in each year. That’s a lot of change. The economy was making record profits, but GM was making record losses. Banks and lenders were hoping against hope that some kind of miracle would fix GM’s problem and keep them afloat. That miracle was you, otherwise known as the American taxpayer----continued at David Horowitz's Newsreal.com Geithner and Whitacre – “In Full and Ahead of Schedule” o
They must have constructed a swap with an off-balance-sheet entity to make it appear like the loan was repaid. This is what we learn how to do as structurers to service our clients.
Posted by: Julian Gammon | May 04, 2010 at 09:43 PM