How will King Obama handle the strong appearance of a conflict of interest…his government owns Toyota’s largest rival and yesterday the government hit their competiton with a $16.4 million fine.
Toyota should fight it as the victims of a Government Motors smear campaign.
Wouldn’t you like to get a look at the King’s ‘enemies list’?
The US Government doesn’t own Ford (yet) ;)
This is why the government should never compete in the same areas that it regulates – banks, mortgages, commercial paper, insurance, electricity generation, rental housing…
http://online.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3022-autosales.html
Those are domestic vehicle sales – note the graphs are 10 year moving averages so they largely mask the implosion of GM in the last decade
Pretty shocking that 60% of GM’s domestic vehicle sales are light duty trucks. How many of that is sales to the US govt? Would the GAO permit writing up bid specs that favor one specific manufacturer? In the “emergency” stimulus spending was there even a competitive bidding process?
The purchase of GM is payback for the unions. I heard GM owed 66 Billion before the govt. buy-out, and no one else was going to purchase them. And they got NOTHING for the Hummer brand. At least Hummer had some military value.
The real question is: how much will we CONTINUE to spend to bail them out as time goes forward?
Will GM become a permanent line item in the US federal budget?
And Ford continues to thrive, because they did what they had to do – get down to business.
The real moment of truth comes when it is time for the next UAW contract renewal. Will the UAW leaders put the squeeze on their own members, or will it capitulate to all of the Union’s demands?
This is a subject with great fascination for me; contracts, the Delphi Laswuit (referenced in another post), political favors, a worker-owned car company, pension dumping and on and on….
Everything is so confilicted; it almost seems like the Obama plan is to make the government so vast that it’s impossible for it to have conflicting interests simply due to sheer size.
See if this sounds familiar:
Pitigliani, The Italian Corporative State, p. 93.
(And yes, I know the bailout started with George Bush)