The cost of our investment in GM and Chrysler

The U.S. Taxpayer - the loser!!
http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2009/04/23/mean-street-chrysler-crisis-you-lose-taxpayers/



The sad part is that we had to see this coming. Investing billions of dollars of U.S. Taxpayer money into the auto industry looked like a questionable deal. I felt that investing in GM had a potential benefit of saving a large number of jobs (both at GM and all of the suppliers, dealers, etc that feed off GM) and thereby, keeping the U.S. economy a float. But the more that we see, the reality is that the whole auto industry is in a slump, and bad management in this type of environment is going to kill, not just slow an industry down.

Chrysler is essentially bankrupt, I don't know what their cash position is these days, but who is going to buy a vehicle from them now. GM still has some strong brands but there is no way that they are going to remain the number 1 car company in the world. They are going to have to shed huge assets at a steep discount, and the taxpayer is going to foot that bill.

We'll see what Fiat does with these two negotiations, it feels like they are in a position to benefit from the government intervention by low balling these failing companies and getting assets on the cheap, maybe we should have given them the money...