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The U.S. government lost $11.2 billion on its bailout of General Motors Co, more than the $10.3 billion the Treasury Department estimated when it sold its remaining GM shares in December, according to a government report released on Wednesday. The $11.2 billion loss includes a write-off in March of the government's remaining $826 million investment in "old" GM, the quarterly report by a Treasury watchdog said.

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew will visit bankrupt Detroit this week to highlight the Obama administration's "continued commitment to the city's revitalization and explore ways to promote job creation and economic growth," according to an advisory his department released on Monday. --snip-- "I have urged President Obama to examine all options for executive action to help the city of Detroit overcome its fiscal challenges, and I am pleased that he is seeking to take positive action," said Representative John Conyers, a Democrat from Michigan. "I will be discussing further legislative options with my colleagues in Congress."

Washington - Even when Sylvia Mathews Burwell was in her early 30s, friends speculated that she might return to her native Hinton, W.Va., and run for governor someday. After all, she had been a Rhodes scholar, and her mother — who later became mayor of Hinton, pop. 2,600 — had driven her daughter’s interest in politics. So far that has not happened, but plenty of other things under two presidents have. On Friday, President Obama is to nominate Ms. Burwell, currently director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, to take over one of the largest and most...

Enrollment for the president's health care law has grown to 7.5 million Americans, the Obama administration announced Thursday, handing President Barack Obama and the Democrats bigger coverage numbers to tout in the face of election-year attacks. Sebelius said she expects the figure to continue to grow. The original number already exceeded expectations, a surprise success after a disastrous roll-out and welcome news for Democrats who've been forced to defend their support for the unpopular law derided by critics as "Obamacare." Democratic senators took turns Thursday praising the robust sign-up numbers.

Eric Cantor ‏@GOPLeader 1h I thank Secretary Sebelius for her service. She had an impossible task: nobody can make Obamacare work.

Put another way, Kathleen Sebelius has resigned and “Senior Administration Officials” are telling the media it is because of healthcare.gov. You do not have a celebration event last week to celebrate 7 million sign ups and have Sebelius there to get credit then this week throw her under the bus because of a screw up that happened last October. They have been standing with her since last October. They stood with her when the President’s polling was nosediving and throwing her under the bus could have stopped the bleeding. They are doing so now. Sebelius actually resigned last week and...

It’s Wednesday. So it’s time for more bad news. If you’ve been paying attention, you will have already noticed that the United States is headed toward a cliff of imminent destruction at astonishing speeds. Our financial situation is dire, our political situation is dismal, our international situation is tenuous, and our cultural situation is pathetic. It’s sad. I didn’t think my generation would live to see this, but it looks like America is past the point of no return in its drive toward complete collapse.The most recent sign of doom in the financial sector is the alarming news that China...

General Motors recently recalled close to a million vehicles for a deadly problem that resulted in six deaths. The models involved were Chevy Cobalts and Pontiac G5s from the 2005 through 2007 model years. The question is, why did NHTSA and GM wait so long to recall vehicles with a dangerous defect when the problems surfaced years ago? Scouring the internet reveals many reported stalling incidents for the models in question. My particular Google search went back to 2009 and unearthed disturbing evidence that GM did not properly address issues with faulty vehicles. While the vehicles were manufactured by...

General Motors announced disappointing earnings results today and issued a warning that first quarter results will underwhelm as well. The reasons behind the earnings' miss are surely going to be explained away by pundits and proponents of the company still known as Government Motors to many. Sorting through the smoke and mirrors can lead to some important and simple explanations as to what is going on at GM. Before looking at the reasons why GM has drastically underperformed the broader markets since the Obama-orchestrated bankruptcy process of 2009, let's take a look at one of the most critical takeaways from...

First, the Obama administration showed during the course of the GM and Chrysler bankruptcy proceedings, that when it comes to Most Preferred Voter classes, some unsecured creditors - namely labor unions, and the millions of votes they bring - are more equal than other unsecured creditors - namely bondholders, and the zero votes they bring. Five years later we are about to get a stark reminder that under the superpriority rule of a community organizer for whom "fairness" trumps contract law any day, it is now Detroit's turn to make a mockery of the recovery waterfall. As it turns out,...

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, House Speaker Jase Bolger and Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville submitted a $350 million plan to benefit the City of Detroit. But the state has repeatedly given Motown extra cash and allowed special rules to help get the city out of repeated jams. When asked last month if extra state help was on the table, Detroit Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr responded: "No. It was made abundantly clear that a state bailout of Detroit's finances was not a possibility." The proposed deal, which would have to be agreed to by the full Legislature, signals an unfortunate about-face....

The Obama Administration may have sold the last of the taxpayers' shares in General Motors, but it appears that politics will continue to play a powerful role in the management of the company. New GM CEO Mary Barra did not seem too concerned about appearances when she attended the State of the Union as Obama's guest. Her predecessor Dan Akerson in previous months had gone to great lengths to distance GM from the federal government. With President Obama praising Ms. Barra in front of the nation, the field is once again set for GM to take the stage during upcoming...

Bailing Out Health Insurers and Helping Obamacare Jeffrey H. Anderson January 13, 2014 Robert Laszewski—a prominent consultant to health insurance companies—recently wrote in a remarkably candid blog post that, while Obamacare is almost certain to cause insurance costs to skyrocket even higher than it already has, “insurers won’t be losing a lot of sleep over it.” How can this be? Because insurance companies won’t bear the cost of their own losses—at least not more than about a quarter of them. The other three-quarters will be borne by American taxpayers. For some reason, President Obama hasn’t talked about this particular feature...

**SNIP** But a lot of people are having fun trying to decipher if there was something meaningful to be discerned here. Visiting the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Biden said to Ford Motor Company Chairman William Clay Ford Jr., “Thanks for saving our #.” What? Now you might think it would be an auto executive saying to Biden, “Thanks for saving our #,” although Ford didn’t take the bailout money GM and Chrysler took (although Ford has accepted plenty of federal support in other forms, such as loans for green technology development).

The internet was ablaze Tuesday evening with stories presenting a perceived positive move by General Motors' outgoing government-appointed management. All hail! "General Motors to pay first dividend since 2008," trumpeted the headlines. GM shares immediately spiked up in after-hours trading with shares rising about $1.60 or 4% on the news. Unfortunately for those duped by the proclamation, GM followed the story hours later with a profit warning. For the time being, the bad news outweighed the good with GM shares reversing course and ending the day Wednesday with a loss of over one and a half percent on a day...

At the beginning of 2014, Detroit may be bankrupt, but they’re cheering the five-year-old U.S. auto bailout in Italy. That’s because after being the beneficiary of billions in U.S. taxpayer largesse, Fiat, the leading Italian auto company, is going to buy its final stake in Chrysler from that other big bailout recipient, the United Auto Workers (UAW). “Chrysler’s Now Fully an Italian Auto Company,” reads the Time magazine online headline. But wait a minute! Wasn’t the bailout supposed to be about saving the American auto industry? As Mark Beatty and wrote in The Daily Caller in November 2012, after presidential...

While the Obama Administration is still pumping resources and taxpayer money into the implementation of Obamacare, the initial disbursement of pork included in the bill was successfully doled out almost a full two years ago. And the main recipient of taxpayer largess was, once again, the UAW. The Obamacare pork came in the form of a program called the Early Retiree Reinsurance Program or ERRP. $5 billion of taxpayer money was allocated to help pay for healthcare costs to retirees between the age of 55 and 65 . Number one on the union-dominated list of recipients was the UAW, which...

The humiliation of losing our sovereignty was palpable in 2010. Now is our best opportunity to inaugurate a new phase of Irish statehood ___ And yet, much was made of the description “the loss of sovereignty” in the context of that bailout being imposed in 2010. The despondency and humiliation was palpable, reflected memorably in an Irish Times editorial that invoked the 1916 Rising: “A bailout from the German chancellor with a few shillings of sympathy from the British chancellor on the side. There is the shame of it all. Having obtained our political independence from Britain to be the...

Just days after the US government announced their exit from General Motors, the company announced a move that sounds like it could have come directly out of the Obama Administration playbook. GM is boasting about "creating or retaining" roughly a thousand jobs at the cost of approximately $1.3 million per job in a move that could only be viewed as a positive from a political point of view. The heavy spending to preserve union jobs did not go unrecognized by the Obama-friendly UAW. UAW Vice President Joe Ashton stated: Today's announcement is a win for American workers. The UAW is...

Yesterday, I confronted outgoing General Motors CEO Dan Akerson, the speaker at a National Press Club luncheon. At a press conference beforehand, and through the first question at the conclusion of his remarks, I requested that GM repay taxpayers the $10 billion in direct GM bailout costs. Akerson's refusal dominated much of the media coverage of the event. This was clearly not the story line that Akerson intended. In short, we happily stepped all over his message that the bailout is a success and that GM is back. The USA Today/Detroit Free Press story is headlined. "GM's CEO rejects repaying...