Randomly Noted

This week’s Steven Rattner-Paul Ingrassia on-stage chat at a Dow Jones conference was lots of fun – if you’ve been around the car industry for a while, there’s no such thing as too much automotive inside baseball and gossip. At the end of the day, however, what has stayed with me is that we really don’t know how much money got pumped into General Motors and Ford during the crisis of 2008-09. Rattner, explaining and defending his stint as President Obama’s auto czar, maintains American taxpayers would get most of their money back if GM were to IPO today. But he himself admitted this doesn’t include the billions pumped into GMAC, GM’s erstwhile financing arm. And it wouldn’t seem to include the billions poured into GM and Chrysler in the months between November 2008 and the creation of the federal auto task force in February 2009 – a period during which the government scrambled to simply stabilize the companies prior to a radical restructuring. Until someone forensically analyzes ALL of the costs of salvaging GM and Chrysler, Rattner and others will continue to portray the automotive bailouts as less costly than they really were. Check out Deal Journal’s take on this issue.