- Banned
- #16
Here's what you are missing, as I remember it and evidenced in the article you linked to:Sure! But the argument made was "took no money," not "didn't screw over the American people."
"Many argue that Ford needed the funds to sustain its cash flow during the recession. Ford says it was in better shape than the other two because it had mortgaged its assets in 2006 to raise $23.6 billion. It used the loans to retool its product lineup to focus on smaller, energy-efficient vehicles. It got the United Automobile Workers to agree it could finance half of a new retiree health care trust with company stock. By April 2009, it retired $9.9 billion of the debt it had taken out in 2006."
Neither GM nor Chrysler made such a critical business decision. Ford had the balls, two years a head of the 2008 recession, to basically mortgage the company to improve its product line and modernize it's production capabilities.
Personally, I really have no issue with the bailout. Uncle Sam turned to the private US auto manufactures to bail its ass out of WWII once Roosevelt decided on a whim to get the US into WWII after Pearl Harbor. Further, Nixon created the EPA and OSHA, which immediately injected themselves into the regulation of auto emissions and fuel efficiency and workplace safety, which were engineering nightmares to deal with at a time of global energy unrest and union labor unrest in the US. I am old enough to remember how those political decisions in the late 1960s affected the US auto products going into the 1970s, especially starting in 1973. While the cars of today have massively improved because of some of those political decisions, it wreaked financial havoc on the US auto industry that, in my opinion, it has never really recovered from.
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