Originally Posted By: blackman777
Yeah but at what cost? If it costs $1 million to save a $50,000/year job, that's bad financing. ALSO it required printing trillions of dollars, which devalues every dollar already circulating (your savings are worth less). The dollar is only worth 1/95th what it was when the Fed was created, and it just keeps dropping, because they keep printing more of them.
Sorry but I don't support the redistribution of wealth from the poor (that's us) to the rich (megacorps & corporate officers). Or the slow destruction of the dollar/personal savings.
Nobody should have been bailed out.
I'd say the effect on the economy has been excellent, starting with the 5% drop in the Michigan unemployment rate, and probably similar effects throughout the upper midwest. Then there is the ripple effect across the entire economy. We've quietly been undergoing an export boom, with many of those exports being from those areas.
More directly, the bailouts saved a million jobs, at a time when an increase in monthly employment in the 200K range is thought to be excellent. GM has generated $30 billion in profits during that time, and invested over $10 billion in the U.S. economy. While GM was not directly profitable to the government, its loss loss was small and represented about three weeks worth of our wars when they were going full tilt. Chrysler was a very small loss to the government.
Remember, its pure dumb luck that Ford was still standing. They had mortgaged everything to raise cash at the time of crash. Not a normal circumstance. Normally they would have been swept away too, with no domestic auto industry left, save for some transplants.
