The big promise of TARP was supposed to keep the unemployment under 8%, epic failure there. Taxpayers are going to lose at least $10 billion on GM, not counting the loans GM still owes, cash for clunkers and the Chevy Volt subsidies.
The remaining taxpayer shares would have to jump from $33/share to $51/share just to break even on the loan, not gonna happen.
The Frank-Dodd financial reform bill codifies into law future bailouts. It creates a permanent new bailout authority that undermines our bankruptcy system and rule of law. Too big to fail is alive and well. This administration will trumpet how well Bailout Nation "worked" to justify future bailouts of other firms.
The chief economic case against the bailout was not that huge infusions of taxpayer funds and special exemptions from bankruptcy rules could not make G.M. and Chrysler profitable. Of course they could. Instead, the heart of the case against the bailout is that it saps the life-blood of entrepreneurial capitalism. The bailout reinforces the debilitating precedent of protecting firms deemed “too big to fail.” Capital and other resources are thus kept glued by politics to familiar lines of production, thus impeding entrepreneurial initiative that would have otherwise redeployed these resources into newer, more-dynamic, and more productive industries. The “success” of the bailout is all too easy to engineer and to see. The cost of the bailout—the industries, the jobs, and the outputs that are never created—is impossible to see, but nevertheless real. George Mason University economist Don Boudreaux
Bookmarks