Did General Motors Really Repay Its Taxpayer Bailout?
April 24th, 2010
Government Motors
General Motors announced this week that it repaid its multibillion-dollar taxpayer-backed TARP loans. GM even bragged that it was able to “repay the taxpayers in full, with interest, ahead of schedule, because more customers are buying [GM] vehicles.” There was great fanfare, including expensive, around-the-clock GM TV commercials nationwide. But, the hype is not the reality. In fact, GM did not repay the loans with money it earned from selling cars. Instead, GM repaid the TARP loans with money it withdrew from another TARP fund at the Treasury Department.
The day before the GM story broke, Neil Barofsky, the government TARP watchdog, testified before the Senate Finance Committee. He explained that GM did not use earnings to repay its TARP debt. The April quarterly report to Congress from his office stated: “The source of funds for these quarterly [debt] payments will be other TARP funds currently held in an escrow account.”
GM filings with the SEC reveal that GM was paying 7 percent interest on a $6.7 billion TARP debt. The filings also confirm that the source of funds for GM’s debt repayments was a multibillion-dollar TARP-funded escrow account at Treasury; that means it was taxpayer money — not earnings.
Meanwhile, in all the fanfare and patting themselves on the back, Treasury and GM made no mention of what happened to the $2.5 billion loan GM owes its union health care plan. The union loan carries a 9 percent interest rate and runs until 2017. Don’t most Americans try to pay off their higher-interest debts first? Well, the union loan was not paid off. Why not? Does the union get to keep collecting 9 percent from GM until 2017, courtesy of the American taxpayer, while taxpayers give up a 7 percent return over the next five years in exchange for the hope that GM stock will be worth more than what we paid for it, someday down the road?
April 24th, 2010 at 10:14 am
The “PRIME EXAMPLE of the SMOKE & MIRRORS Doctrine!!”
They must ALL Think that the Citizens of America all have an I.Q. of NO MORE than 10???
Fool me Once, SHAME on ME, Fool me TWICE???
April 24th, 2010 at 10:40 am
Can’t help but think that GM made this statement, knowing that we know its not true and what can they gain from this statement?
Originally Bush said no to that bailout and Paulson beat Bush up, then gave in with a deadline of 3-31-09 for the money to be paid back to the people. Obama killed that deal and made his own with the take over of GM.
Do they think we don’t remember their rants and lies? It’s all documented, this just goes to show what liars and theives these criminals are.
You guys are all toast–just watch it happen in Nov!!!
April 24th, 2010 at 12:07 pm
Heather, I agree with you 100%! However, if you study the “communities” of corporations, bureaucracies, etc., you will discover a certain kind of “mindset” which assumes that nothing negative will result from your actions. An example of this is the concept of being “too big to fail” which has permeated the current administration. They seem to lack or ignore people who stand up and say “Wait a minute, this plan is wrong, and cannot possibly work!”. Now that America is finally waking up, this assumption will be their downfall and work to the benefit of the People.
April 24th, 2010 at 2:10 pm
They are such liars they make me sick. it is even worse than that. They know that we know they are liars and they just keep on coming out and telling us their lies anyways, it is almost like them laughing in our face to rub it in.
Oh why, oh why can’t we get rid of him and the rest of those meserable disgusting excuses for human beings?
April 24th, 2010 at 4:33 pm
mtnmyst-yes I agree with you–my mother taught me years ago–the bigger you are the harder you fall–and they will fall and it will be hard and it will be deep. And they will not survive this fall for it was them who planned and created and implimated this coup in our country.
grumpy-they make me sick too and I am so sick of seeing them all on tv daily, and radio and their drama. The last laugh will be our laugh on them you can bet on it.
And I anticipate it won’t be long before we are hysterical laughing! I can’t see him lasting until Nov–there are too many forces coming at him at once and his lies are doubling and he is backtracking which means he knows his time is short.
I wonder if the Bilderbergers, the IMF, the UN, the Tril Comm will be the ones to take him down. He will not resign, nor will he be impeached, and he certainly won’t walk away quietly. The banksters and George Soros will come for him. When you play the game with the big boys-you take it like a man when you fail!
April 24th, 2010 at 6:03 pm
heather #5
I still have concerns about those Electronic voting machines,they are like
In fact,I going to try to vote
Even though,I can see November,from my house
“dead men” that tell no tales.After the “magic computer” runs the
tally,there isn’t any way to check and see if “the computer” is short of a few transistors.
absentee on a good ole paper ballot,of course “the magic computer” can negate that.
April 25th, 2010 at 1:35 pm
GM Used Bailout Money to Repay Loan
http://www.infowars.com/gm-used-bailout-money-to-repay-loan/
Excerpts:
A top Senate Republican on Thursday accused the Obama administration of misleading taxpayers about General Motors’ loan repayment, saying the struggling auto giant was only able to repay its bailout money by dipping into a separate pot of bailout money.
Sen. Chuck Grassley’s charge was backed up by the inspector general for the bailout — also known as the Trouble Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Watchdog Neil Barofsky told Fox News, as well as the Senate Finance Committee, that General Motors used bailout money to pay back the federal government.
“It appears to be nothing more than an elaborate TARP money shuffle,” Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said in a letter Thursday to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
“The bottom line seems to be that the TARP loans were ‘repaid’ with other TARP funds in a Treasury escrow account. The TARP loans were not repaid from money GM is earning selling cars, as GM and the administration have claimed in their speeches, press releases and television commercials,” he wrote.
Barofsky told the Senate Finance Committee the same thing Tuesday, and said the main way for the federal government to earn money out of GM would be through “a liquidation of its ownership interest.”
April 25th, 2010 at 3:21 pm
@ William #6
I’ve been telling everyone to use paper ballots, too. Don’t trust these computer voting machines owned by Chavez. We are fortunate here where I live that we can choose either paper or computer voting. I’m still concerned that the paper ballots can be tampered with, too, by disappearing or tabulated wrong. Wasn’t it discovered in a picture &/or video that Lyndon Jonhson held up some ballot boxes that he confiscated and bragged about stealing them during his election?