Taxpayers Face Heavy Losses on Auto Bailout

The prospect of recovering the government's assistance to GM and Chrysler is heavily dependent on shares of the two companies rising to unprecedented levels, the report said. The government owns 10 percent of Chrysler and 61 percent of GM.

The shares "will have to appreciate sharply" for taxpayers to get their money back, the report said.

Treasury Department officials have acknowledged that most of the $23 billion provided by the Bush administration is likely to be lost. But Meg Reilly, a department spokeswoman, said there is a "reasonably high probability of the return of most or all of the government funding" that was provided to assist GM and Chrysler with their restructurings.

Administration officials have previously said they want to maximize taxpayers' return on the investment but want to dispose of the government's ownership interests as soon as practicable.

Greg Martin, a spokesman for the new GM, said the company is "confident that we will repay our nation's support because we are a company with less debt, a stronger balance sheet, a winning product portfolio and the right size to match today's market realities."

The Congressional Oversight Panel was created as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. It is designed to provide an additional layer of oversight, beyond the Special Inspector General for the TARP and regular audits by the Government Accountability Office.

The panel's report recommends that the Treasury Department consider placing its auto company holdings into an independent trust, to avoid any "conflicts of interest."

The report also recommends the department perform a legal analysis of its decision to provide TARP funds to GM and Chrysler, their financing arms and many auto parts suppliers. Some critics say the law creating TARP didn't allow for such funding.

Treasury Department officials have acknowledged that most of the $23 billion provided by the Bush administration is likely to be lost.

Duh... Bush should have refused to do it (there was $15B fund already appropriated and committed but unspent - for "greening" of the auto industry - that should have been used) and could help convince the management of both companies to file for prepackaged bankruptcy, which would allow both companies (and maybe Ford, as well) to restructure their debts and union and pension contracts, reorganize and emerge far stronger, without taxpayers losing a dime. Now he is (rightly) being blamed by media and Democrats, who at the time demanded the auto companies bailout, for wasting taxpayers money, i.e., George H.W. Bush "read my lips" and John McCain "media loves me so I can win" redux.

The report also recommends the department perform a legal analysis of its decision to provide TARP funds to GM and Chrysler, their financing arms and many auto parts suppliers. Some critics say the law creating TARP didn't allow for such funding.

Duh... TARP was not designed to be a pool of money available for bailout of just anything that didn't move, like a couple of bankrupt unionized companies in the automobile industry. It was very specific in its purpose to provide liquidity to frozen banking and financial system and stave off the run on the banks (attack on the financial system, by proxy) and allow the 'netting' of the [frozen] assets on the books of financial institutions, in the aftermath of fall of Lehman Bros and run on trillions of dollars in the money market funds in the consequent "breaking the buck" by Reserve Primary Fund managed by Bruce Bent.
It’s Time to Admit it: Money Funds Involve Risk - FR / CNBC / NYT, 2009 August 29.

Sleep-At-Night-Money Lost in Lehman Lesson Missing $63 Billion - BL, 2009 September 09, by Bob Ivry, Mark Pittman and Christine Harper.

Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. left his suite at Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel last Sept. 15 after a sleepless night, feeling he’d done all he could to minimize the damage from that morning’s collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., aides said.
At meetings concluded the previous evening at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Paulson and executives of the world’s largest financial institutions worked to head off two threats they anticipated in the wake of the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history. The bankers spent hours trying to unwind Lehman-related credit-default swaps, bets made on whether companies will repay their debts. And with the help of a rule change by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, they were confident bank-to- bank loans would keep flowing.
Nobody accounted for Bruce R. Bent. The 72-year-old graduate of St. John’s University in Queens, New York, created the first money market fund in 1971, the Reserve Primary Fund. He touted it as an investment so safe it would lull clients to sleep -- so safe that, even with $785 million in loans to tottering Lehman, Bent and his wife had jetted to Rome that Sunday evening to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary.
$3.6 Trillion Market
Bent’s $62.5 billion fund had lent money to Lehman, mostly by acquiring short-term notes called commercial paper, used by companies to pay everyday expenses such as utilities and payroll and by Wall Street to fund everything from takeovers to the mortgages it turns into bonds. Money funds like Bent’s are the biggest buyers of commercial paper, purchasing about 40 percent of outstanding issues, according to the Fed.
It was commercial paper and the $3.6 trillion money market industry that traded the notes that came close to sinking the global economy -- not a breakdown in credit-default swaps or bank-to-bank lending. The bankers were focused on saving themselves, and commercial paper, as invisible as the air they breathed, never came up at the meetings, according to one of the two dozen executives invited to the New York Fed by its president, Timothy F. Geithner, 48, and Paulson.
‘Erosion of Trust’
Like ice-nine, the fictitious substance in Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s 1963 novel “Cat’s Cradle,” a single seed of which could harden all the world’s water, commercial paper was the crystallizing force that froze credit markets, choking off the ability of companies and banks to borrow money and pay bills.

Missing Lehman Lesson of Shakeout Means Too Big Banks May Fail - BL, 2009 September 08, by Bob Ivry, Christine Harper and Mark Pittman. ..... Two dozen of the world’s most powerful bankers, brought together by Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and Federal Reserve Bank of New York President Timothy F. Geithner the weekend of Sept. 13, 2008, to devise a rescue plan for Lehman, were too busy saving themselves to see the larger threat.
“The discussion among the CEOs was ‘How do we prevent the next firm from going under?’” former Merrill Lynch & Co. Chief Executive Officer John A. Thain, who cut a deal to sell his company that weekend, said in an interview. “There should have been much more discussion about the impact directly on the markets if Lehman went bankrupt.”
While everyone assembled at the New York Fed was aware that unbridled subprime-mortgage lending and the packaging of such inferior loans into investment vehicles such as collateralized- debt obligations had pushed the financial system to the breaking point, what the bankers missed almost destroyed them -- and the rest of the global economy.
Blankfein, Dimon
Lehman’s downfall on Monday, Sept. 15, sparked a run on the $3.6 trillion money market industry, which provides short-term loans called commercial paper used by businesses worldwide to cover everyday expenses, including payroll and utilities. The panic left companies such as Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. stranded with insufficient cash and ravaged the accounts of millions of people.
For Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO Lloyd C. Blankfein, JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Jamie Dimon and the rest of the financial chieftains who spent a weekend trying to unwind derivatives trades and keep bank-to-bank loans flowing, ignoring the commercial-paper market, the lifeblood of the economy, proved a catastrophic oversight. Within a week, the U.S. stepped in to halt withdrawals from money market funds, leading to a $1.6 trillion industry backstop, part of $13.2 trillion it has committed to beating back the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. .....

Using TARP money for anything else, but the above - saving the financial system from collapse - and treating it just like the "pot o' gold at the end of the rainbow" - violated the letter and the spirit of the law. So now Bush (and Republicans) will be blamed for the fallout of the bailout.

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