Now there\’s a surprise

A leading General Motors executive has called for government loans of up to $50bn to help American car markers build more fuel-efficient cars.

They\’re going bust (rather in slow motion, to be sure, but they are) so they\’d like to pick he taxpayers\’ pockets.

How amazingly surprising.

No, let them go bust, let the legacy costs be wiped out and then the valuable assets will be plucked from the ruins and the US will get an efficient car manufacturing industry.

8 thoughts on “Now there\’s a surprise”

  1. About time GM and Ford were formally pronounced dead. They’ve been brain stem dead for years. Large corporations are like economies, and if they are run as command economies then they tend to go the same way.

  2. “…and McCain has promised to bale them out”

    An excellent idea: squashing them into cubes and feeding them to cattle is pretty close to the ideal solution.

  3. It’s like watching the Morris/BMC/British Leyland rerun. Although that company at least produced the Mini. Have Ford or GM produced anything of interest in recent decades? (Genuine question – I dunno.)

  4. john b-what’s your basis for that statement? This was his statement after touring the Lordstown GM plant –
    “”Frankly I just don’t see a scenario where the federal government would come in and bail out any industry in America today,” says the Republican. ”
    AFAIK, he has not changed that opinion.

  5. He changed his mind a few days ago on the loans idea.

    I do think we should stop using euphemisms such as “let the legacy costs be wiped out” and instead say something like “let their former employees pensions and healthcare be wiped out”. Essentially it’s not so much that GM is unprofitable now, it was always unprofitable but just hid its costs in the future.

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