I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
Steven Rattner, former head of the Obama administration’s auto taskforce, says that at currently projected stock values, the 61 percent stake that the government took in General Motors should be worth about $25 billion. The Detroit Free Press reports:
The government has sunk $50 billion into GM and $14 billion into Chrysler. Rattner has long maintained that the money the Bush administration gave the automakers — roughly $20 billion for GM and $4 billion for Chrysler — would have to be written off because it wasn’t tied to restructuring.
In exchange for injecting $30 billion into GM as part of its bankruptcy, the government took a 61% equity stake and $8.2 billion in debt. And, Rattner said, based on the market value of GM bonds from pre-bankruptcy that will be converted into shares of the new GM, the 61% stake was worth about $17 billion, giving the government a rough value of $25 billion on its rescue. “We’re actually, even now, pretty close to being able to get back the money” spent by the Obama administration, he said.
He also said, as the Messenger has noted many times, that it would take several years for the government to slowly sell off its stake in GM after the company does an initial public offering of its stock sometime in 2010. The stock must be sold off slowly to avoid depressing its value for other investors and harming the company.
But if the government ends up getting back $25 billion out of the $30 billion that the Obama administration loaned to the company to keep it going through bankruptcy, that would end up being a pretty good deal for taxpayers. When you add up the cost of the federal government taking over the underfunded pensions of the company (nearly $20 billion for GM alone), the cost of unemployment for two or three million unemployed workers, the cost to state and local governments for the social services those workers would then require and the likely hundreds of thousands more bankruptcies and foreclosures, paying $5 billion to keep the company alive and avoid those negative consequences is a heck of a deal.
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