A Congressional oversight committee says it is likely the U.S. government will lose money on its $81 billion investments in Chrysler and General Motors. It does not add the corollary that taxpayers were never going to get their money back.
The Washington Post describes the report, which will be released today, as saying
a $5.4 billion portion of the $10.5 billion owed by Chrysler is “highly unlikely” to be repaid, while full recovery of the $50 billion sunk into GM would require the company’s stock to reach unprecedented heights.
The Post did not make clear how high those “unprecedented heights” might be.
Bloomberg quotes from the report itself:
Congress and ultimately the American taxpayer have been left in the dark concerning details of Treasury?s review process and its methodology and metrics at a time when Treasury committed additional TARP funds to these companies.
[snip]
The Treasury auto team failed to disclose to the public both the factors and criteria it used in its viability assessments, the scope of outside involvement in its evaluations, and its basis and reasoning for selecting particular benchmarks. Simply, its disclosures did not go far enough.
Surprised? I didn’t think so.
