Shoud we have bailed out the car companies??

[elite7]

It seems no matter what we do there are toyotas ever where your opinion

 

[speed dawg]

Maybe, but we should have fired all the CEOs and people in charge.

You have to change things slowly.....Detroit would have been a chaotic place if we had allowed them to fail......Just like many areas would have been a wasteland if the housing market hadn't been bailed out. So, in the end, what I said would have been a good compromise in my opinion.

 

[Bible_Belt]

The government is claiming that they will actually make money off of the bailout loans, after all the interest is repaid.

 

[5string]

Nobody made any money, except for the pensioners.


What actually happened wasn't even the fault of the current CEO's, although they did nothing to mitigate the disaster.

The albatross of pension funding is what killed the car companies, so the answer was to create two separate entities, one with all of the debt, and one without the debt (pension overhead).

.Gov (the taxpayer) takes on the liabilities of the Union's pension, the companies gets saved, and .gov gets to claim that the car companies were "saved" and all of the money lent to the debt-free corporations is paid back.

Oh, and the bloodsucking tic unions still get their ridiculous amount of money for putting on lugnuts.

THIS!!!! ^^^^^^^

 

[Bible_Belt]

The albatross of pension funding is what killed the car companies

And more specifically, the rising cost of health care is what made those pensions get so expensive. When those pension agreements were created decades ago, I don't think anyone had any clue about how the costs would shoot up exponentially over recent decades.

Health care costs are the albatross around the neck of the entire US economy right now. If we ever wonder what happened to the middle class, they got destroyed by the cost of health insurance, student loan debts, the rising price of oil, and the dollar going to sh!t on top of everything else. Whatever "recovery" we are supposed to be experiencing right now is not worth all of the debt that the US is accumulating to finance it.

Regarding the state of the economy overall, this is a random comment about a WSJ article on using the stock market as an economic indicator. I found it interesting:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/20/b...nomic-meetings.html?google_editors_picks=true
Economists, politicians, and journalists above all are always using lazy black-box methods of gauging the progress of the economy. We've seen all the detailed signs of a troubled recovery since this time last year, but so long as the stock market or bond market were booming, they considered things to be good. Everyone needs to understand by now that the stock market is a special type of casino designed to simulate an open market for investable goods of value in order to allow the ultra-wealthy to deposit their funds and be assured of a profit when they take them out. The background technical operations of the stock markets are designed to skim funds from small players and captive investment pools in order to guarantee good results to their plutocratic primary clients. The stock markets are not a genuine indicator of the health of the economy, they are indicators of the scope of personal wealth of the capitalist classes...