Bailout Watch 309: GMAC: Silly Rabbit, Bailouts Are For Corporations
From the “there but for the grace of god go I” file comes the story of one GMAC debtor who can’t catch a break from the company that is catching breaks left and right. The New York Daily News profiles the plight of Chastity Strawder, an unemployed schoolteacher who is falling behind on lease payments for her Pontiac G6. Having leased two G6s (after all the usual credit checks), Strawder developed health problems and lost her job. Now falling behind on lease payments, Strawder is being treated to a series of angry phone calls from GMAC who want their freaking money, man. And Strawder seems to believe that since she and GMAC are in the same boat (“can’t make ends meet”), they might treat her with the same generosity that she (as a taxpayer) is showing them. Apparently not. $6b of public funding or not, GMAC is still in it for GMAC. Or is that Cerberus? Either way, the moral of the story is that bailouts won’t weaken the world’s most powerful force: compound interest.
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@nonce Agreed, but they can negotiate terms, much the same way some banks have come around to realize it's better to have someone pay a mortgage than for a house to sit vacant with the bank holding the note. Oh wait, they are a bank now!
Personally, I'm much more inclined toward giving money to GMAC rather than the big banks or GM. The reason is that GMAC is more likely to lend the money out because their loans are targeted directly to the sale of cars which helps GM do what it really needs to do which is sell cars. So, GM benefits, GMAC benefits and cash starts flowing (rather than going toward buying other banks). In the end even the taxpayer could stand to benefit providing things start to turn around as the Government now owns preferred shares.
>>"...The whole point of the TARP program was to provide infusions that could trickle down to people such as Ms. Strawder. If it doesn’t do that, then there was no reason to give them the money...." The true point of TARP is to give free taxpayer money so that a small set of a few hundred people at banks do not have to be faced with the fruits of their failure, and to reward same with dignity, civility, and a whole &*^$load of cash. Whether anything was supposed to trickle down to deadbeats is another question, but then when did Congress and the Administration spend one second during this whole mess considering the plight of the individual American citizen? Obviously none, since public opinion has been overwhelmingly against all these bailouts, TARP on down. Funny how the news media used to constantly throw polls in our face about Obama, but now say nothing about the overwhelmingly negative poll numbers for these taxpayer throwaways. Are polls important to the media or not- and if they are, when do the media choose to publicize them, and when not?