Posted on 05/30/2009 1:34:43 PM PDT by Justaham
NEW YORK (Reuters) Lee Iacocca, the car executive credited with saving Chrysler from bankruptcy in the 1980s, is to lose a big chunk of his pension and a guaranteed life-long company car due to the U.S. automaker's bankruptcy filing two decades later.
Chrysler CEO Robert Nardelli told a U.S. bankruptcy court on Thursday that Iacocca's pension would be among the obligations Chrysler will no longer have to pay if it gets bankruptcy court approval to sell itself to a "New Chrysler" to be owned by its union, the U.S. and Canadian governments and Fiat SpA (FIA.MI).
(Excerpt) Read more at fe10.story.media.ac4.yahoo.com ...
Well no shi+ Its funny as in sick
“other than living in fear of instant cremation, my Pinto was a nifty little car”.
Got that right.
Got a ‘79,supposedly all that was done.But never tested those waters.
Not surprisingly, I found my memory to be more accurate than what you posted.
Ths US Government actually made about $336 million from the Chrysler loan guarantee deal. Guarantee fees accounted for $25 million, and warrents accounted for the rest. This sounds like a good deal, until you take a closer look at the facts.
Chrysler negotiated a greatly discounted fee for the loan guarantees, they did this by getting Congress to accept warrents for 14.4 million shares of stock in lieu of most of the fee.
This 14.4 million shares was much less than should have been available. Had Congress simply bought $1.2 billion worth of newly issued stock, at the current market price, they would have received many times as many shares, with approximately the same risk.
Congress agreed to much less compensation than was justified by current market conditions. This made me angry at the time, but what made me really angry was what happened about 3-2/3 years later.
Chrysler should have paid about $40 million in loan guarantee fees (per the agreement), and talked Congress into accepting $25 million. The warrents were worth over $350 million, and Lee Iacocca talked Congress into accepting $311 million.
Yes, it sounds like this was a good investment, but Congress would have made billions of dollars, if they had been guided by the markets.
Quite frankly, Congress had no business doing any of this. The Heritage Foundation has an interesting column about the hidden costs of this deal.
You might want to be careful about throwing around words like "troll" and "stupid", when it's easy for third parties to check up on what you say.
“The way I see it, the company is bankrupt. All pensions should be voided, including the union pensions. The shareholders are getting zip, and so should everyone else.”
Exactly!
Exactly. The 1979 Chrysler bailout only delayed the inevitable by 30 years. Even on a purely objective level, if these bailouts were effective, then Chrysler wouldn't be needing one now, right?
I think it is safe to say that the bailout money thrown at GM and Chrysler in 2008 and 2009 will never, ever be repaid.
We should boycott GM and Chrysler. I am proud to say that I have never, ever bought anything made by the Big 3. I did not want a single penny of my hard-earned paycheck going to the anti-USA UAW.
I'll consider Fords, but only if they are not made in the USA by the UAW.
Which is exactly what would have happened had Bush not thrown Chrysler and GM a lifeline. Both companies would have had to go through a conventional bankruptcy process instead.
And that other Ford failure, the....Mustang.
And what was the outcome?
I didn’t know that; Do you have links so I can read how it went down?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.