Friday, April 23, 2010

Sleight of hand

So if I give you a lot of money, and you give me as collateral part of your company.....Then I pay part of the money back  and the rest of the money is tied up in my stock whose value is determined by me......


Have you repaid my loan in full?

GM , the Obama administration, and, apparently the inept reporters think so.

$52 billion (yeah, BILLION) in loans. (from the US Government) plus 9+ billion from the Canadians.

They repaid 8.1 billion cash. You do the math.

Seems to me that they have a small issue to resolve before they can claim that the loans are repaid.

But then again, I am not a "nuanced" sort of guy like the reporters claim to be....

My training is as an engineer, where the math says what it says, and there are no phantom things like in finance.

So perhaps I am missing something. It would seem to me that there is somewhere on the order of $42 billion yet to be repaid (plus interest) yet to go before the debt is settled.

ETA: additional thoughts here. Take the time to read the comments.

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