Mark Souder - Financial Wizard
Posted by Jeff Pruitt - 3/31/09 @ 10:08 am - Filed Under Uncategorized
Good grief this guy is dense:
Souder said GM’s recovery plan, which included buyouts for employees and government loans, would have led to the company’s stabilization when the overall economy recovered.
He said the market should have been allowed to work, which may have led to GM’s bankruptcy or a prebankruptcy agreement instead of “a government takeover.”
He can’t be serious. No person with half a brain could read those viability plans and think they would work. I’d bet you money Souder hasn’t even read them - somebody should ask him about some of the details and watch him squirm. Furthermore the government isn’t “taking over” GM and the bankruptcy that Souder desires is exactly what the administration is considering. Here’s another gem:
He also criticized Obama’s move to ask GM’s chief executive, Rick Wagoner, to step down.
Souder said Wagoner made mistakes, but he has a Harvard Business School degree and worked for decades in the industry.
Gee, I assumed we were a results-based society and not some elitist breeding ground where the only thing that matters is how much money your parents had and what college you could afford to attend. Wagoner was a massive failure - there’s absolutely no arguing that. He deserved to fired long ago and if his hand-picked cronies on the board wouldn’t do it then I’m glad the taxpayer did.
And just in case you didn’t think Souder could take ridiculousness to a new level:
By contrast, he said, the people Obama chose to oversee the changes are “a journalist and a college professor.”
The truth?
Rattner was a reporter for the New York Times more than 20 years ago and since then has spent two decades as a Wall Street financier. Montgomery, who has a doctorate from Harvard, was a top official in the Labor Department in the Clinton administration and now is a dean at the University of Maryland.
Awful jackass…
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While I disagree with most of Souder’s assessment, he nailed the makeup of group that dreamed up all of these stupid solutions to the collapse of the auto companies. The journalist and the college professor are indeed unqualified to render decisions related to the building and selling cars.
The Obama guidelines given to the “committee” was to find a way to keep the UAW employed. The best description of what can be expected from the ill-conceived events of this week were described by an Atlantic blog reader named Kevin:
1. Congress wants GM to make cars that are too small to share the highways with semis. People want to have cars that are comfortable rather than being packed into them like sardines.
Any plan that has GM making the cars that Congress wants GM to make, would require a merger with Remington Arms or some company similar to that, because they’re going to have to hold guns on people to buy them.
2. Any company too big to be allowed to fail is too big to be allowed to exist. General Motors needs to be broken up into a scad of little companies, each having one factory or perhaps no factory at all. In fact, General Motors went a long way to getting started on this path, by shedding Delphi. Little companies scramble in ways that big companies cannot. It’s not the big that eat the small. It’s the fast that dine on the slow.
3. The biggest single problem General Motors has is legacy costs. If the government organizes universal health care, so that retiree health care is not GM’s burden, that alone would make GM as competitive as any company on earth.
4. I don’t feel good about this. We’ve lost steel to foreign companies, and we’re about to lose the automotive industry. When we lose GM and Chrysler, it’s going to be hard for Ford to survive, and with their demise will come the companies that manufacture paint, and glass, and headliners, and steering wheels. With their demise, it’ll be a bigger struggle for Caterpillar, and John Deere, and Case-New Holland, all of whom are big exporters to the entire world.
5. Most important among the suppliers to the automotive industries is a company called Cincinnati Milacron. Milacron makes precision milling equipment - best in the world, hands down. Something you need, if you’re going to build nuclear weapons, is milling equipment from Milacron. As long as Milacron has a virtual monopoly, as long as they are an American company, then the state department has a pretty good tool to fight terrorism, in the form of export controls. But if they are seriously weakened, there are other companies around the world that would love to topple Milacron’s reputation for making the best stuff. If the companies buying this equipment are foreign-owned, they’ll buy from the competitors, and the competitors will get better. And they’ll be selling equipment to the terrorists without the state department around to say no.
6. Remember the big deal with Toshiba or one of those Japanese companies, stealing the technology for making really quiet submarine propellers, and selling props to the russians during the cold war? It was a big scandal at the time; but we ain’t seen nothing yet.
to bad Wagoner couldn’t take souder with him wherever he goes.