Thursday, April 30, 2009

What's 8 billion dollars between friends?

In yet ANOTHER bid to save the struggling automaker, President Barack Obama today announced he will be giving Chrysler another $8b to finance chapter 11 bankruptcy. And yes, it will include selling a large portion of the company to the Italian Fiat.

Bankruptcy doesn't mean the nation's No. 3 automaker will shut down. A Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing would allow a judge to decide how much the company's creditors would get while the company continues to operate. The goal is for the whole process to happen quickly, Obama said, perhaps within a couple months.

The president said that Chrysler has been responsible for helping to build the American middle class, but over the years also had been weakened by "papering over tough problems and avoiding hard choices."

...The Obama administration had long hoped to stave off bankruptcy for Chrysler LLC, but it became clear that a holdout group of creditors wouldn't budge on proposals to reduce Chrysler's $6.9 billion in secured debt. Obama praised all the constituencies that have offered sacrifices and blasted those that did not.

He said a group of investment firms and hedge funds were holding out for the prospect of an unjustified taxpayer bailout.
Can anyone tell us when the flow of funds will *STOP*? There has to come a point where we will have invested more in the company than it is worth (if we have not already reached that point). At some point, do we not have to bite the bullet and let nature take its course?

I don't want to know what the bill is going to be when GM's execs decide to follow the same route. More and more it seems like that is not an "if" but a "when".

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