He Laughed at Accidental Sirens That Broke the Evening Gloom
Mittens: dead wrong on the auto bailout, and consequently prone to lying about it.
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I love when Mitt talks about how we should have let private individuals and groups come through and save the auto industry, and not the US government.
Mitt forgets that a lot of HIS money was tied up in his losing 2008 election efforts.
And that a lot of his rich friends were panicking, and hiding their money in case the US’s, and/or the entire worlds, economyies tanked.
Maybe if you, as the son of an auto executive, had tried to put a consortium together, you’d be in a position to criticize.
But you didn’t, so you ain’t.
There was no one left Mitt, but Obama and the government.
Oh, and wasn’t it you and your rich friends, who, after almost 30 years of rampant greed, almost collapsed the system?
STFU!
but those michigan trees, just the right height! and cars, cars sure are nifty! and some of them look different than other ones, but not as much as they used to, especially toyota! lakes, oh, all kinds of lakes, big lakes, little lakes, and all the lakes in between, just the best! and the way michigan is easily mappable on a hand, so convenient for conversations! and the red wings, they play the ice hockey like real red-blooded americans, not like those frenchies the canadiens!
fails the turing test.
The bit from that quote about how he could identify any car in the 50′s and 60′s by looking at one square foot of almost any part of a car (with hand gestures!) was really my favorite. I mean, does anyone believe that? When would the opportunity even arise to do it once, let alone to determine that you could do it consistently?
right, if he had claimed that he could identify the make, model, and year of a car just by looking at, you know, the whole car, i could believe that. my dad does this all the time. that’s a ’67 mustang, he’ll point out. how he knows it’s not a ’66 or a ’68, i don’t know, so i’m duly impressed. but i’m pretty sure that showing him one square foot of the front quarter panel wouldn’t cut it. mittens can’t even lie correctly, or make it somewhat believable, which is so pathetic.
I can do what your dad does, but it does need the car (or an easily ID’ed part of it, like the grille or tail light). Too bad nobody can show Mitt some pics of exactly one square foot of some of Detroit’s models of the day and demand an answer. I bet he’d get most wrong.
Exactly. A picture of one square foot of, say, the rear seat or a quarter panel isn’t going to tell you a whole lot for most cars.
I think it shows how out of touch he is with Real America, frankly. I could tell you the make, model, year, and at least the first part of the VIN of any American car, ever, blindfolded, just from the smell of the running engine. I can’t do Japanese cars because the wasabi gets all up in my nostrils and burns like hell, and German cars all smell like sausages.
That would be more impressive if it weren’t partially redundant: the first part of the VIN number encodes some of the other information you list.
… also, what about electric cars?
I CAST THEE OUT, HIPPIE SCUM!
But I love the VIN numbers here, just the right length, not too long or anything. And the numbers, gosh I love the numbers, sure the even numbers but also the little odd numbers in there.
My VIN’s bigger
In future, all VIN numbers will consist entirely of “I”s, “O”s lower case “L”s, ones and zeros.
but those michigan trees, just the right height!
There are few things Romney has said that enrage me more. All those trees are that height because the old growth forest was completely logged off in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. He likes the aesthetics of the aftermath of an environmental disaster.
But gosh what a great height it is! I love that height, the height that they are. And I love clouds, you know when I was younger if you let me listen to about 10 seconds of a cloud passing overhear I could tell you what kind of cloud it was. Now we’ve got all those foreign clouds and I can’t understand their languages. Gosh, language, I love that word, but only the English one, right? It’s got all the right letters in there, sure the consonants, but all those vowels sprinkled in there, and that “y”–nobody knows what it is! I love it! And it sounds just like the word “why,” which is not a word I love very much, but gosh I love that the letter and the word sound the same! There’s a song whose title plays on that, it’s a favorite of mine, I’m sure you all know it, it’s “Y U Mad” by Birdman, featuring Nicki Minaj and Lil Wayne. Can we sing that all together right now?
I am the female Weezy, this shit is easy
Pull up in that new new, bitch get a squeegee
Yeah my flow sick, yeah my flow queasy
Haha, they were sleeping on me, z-zz-zz
This p-ssy clean, this p-ssy squeeky
That p-ssy old, that p-ssy creaky
When I’m out the country, niggas call me Neeki
Hi, How are you? Yes, it’s nice to meet me
Damn, Billboard, I mean I’m winning but I’m still bored
Yeah we shine, gold cluster
As for your career, dead: Ghost Busters
That’s why you mad
Thats why you why you mad mad
That’s why you mad
Thats why you why you mad mad
That’s why you mad
Thats why you why you mad mad…
Good job, Mr. Gulag. You’re absolotely right that Mitt was uniquely placed (autos, financier, government wannabe) to put together a consortium or come up with some other brilliant idea.
When Mittens says “save”, he means that vulture capitalists should have looted the companies, fired their employees, destroyed their productivity, and then sold off the dessicated husk for whatever they could get.
The craziest thing about the last debate was that John King straight up asked Romney “you say you wanted GM to go through a managed bankruptcy instead of a bailout, but there wasn’t enough credit available to keep the company afloat during the bankruptcy process. Nobody would lend the company the funds it needed to go through that process except the government. How do you respond to that?”
And Romney just goes “Well John, I tell ya, Obama finally came around. They shoveled billions of dollars into GM, and then decided that hey, I was right, that they should go through managed bankruptcy after all.”
And King just lets that slide, instead of saying “UH THOSE FUNDS WERE USED FOR THE MANAGED BANKRUPTCY PROCESS, MITT, THAT’S WHAT I WAS SAYING. RESPOND TO THE QUESTION, BITTE.”
John King did what he does best, and which he learned from Wolf – he rolled over, and played dead.
I notice they never let Rachel Maddow moderate a Republican debate.
I wonder why that is?
Wolf Blitzer.
Campbell Brown.
Now John King.
CNN debate moderators are uniformly awful.
CNN
debate moderators areis uniformly awful.FTFY
In techinal parlance, a moderator is supposed to make it like nothing is happening. I think the CNN moderators are doing that pretty well.
No. The sole reason for these debates is to make people more informed about the candidates. If the moderators allow the candidates to use jargon about things that most people don’t know about in order to obscure the fact that their position doesn’t make any sense, the moderators are doing terrible jobs.
Lesbian cooties. The ones Santorum is afraid college students may be exposed to.
A number of superfluous words somehow crept into your link tag along with the necessary seven.
I see where Nate Thurm will have a new job in the Romney administration
Who?
This guy.
Thanks for linking it, Sub.
Hard to believe it’s thirty years now
I found the link in the refrigerator. Damned if I can remember why I put it in there.
I’ve put my TV remote in the refrigerator several times now. Next time, I plan on leaving myself a note explaining why.
Silly me. I kind of aged out of SNL when I got a Sunday church job and could no longer sleep in.
Mitt had warned of reprecussions–they followed none too soon . . .
Get his autograph while you can folks.
I bet he’ll ask which hand he want you to sign it with.
Old Bowie song:
He looked a lot like Che Guevara,
drove a diesel van
Kept his gun in quiet seclusion,
such a humble man
The only survivor of the National People’s Gang
Panic in Detroit, I asked for an autograph
He wanted to stay home, I wish someone would phone
Panic in Detroit
He laughed at accidental sirens that broke the evening gloom
The police had warned of repercussions
They followed none too soon
A trickle of strangers were all that were left alive
Panic in Detroit, I asked for an autograph
He wanted to stay home, I wish someone would phone
Panic in Detroit
Putting on some clothes I made my way to school
And I found my teacher
crouching in his overalls
I screamed and ran to smash my favorite slot machine
And jumped the silent cars that slept at traffic lights
Having scored a trillion dollars,
made a run back home
Found him slumped across the table.
A gun and me alone
I ran to the window. Looked for a plane or two
Panic in Detroit.
He’d left me an autograph
“Let me collect dust.”
I wish someone would phone
Panic in Detroit
Ah yes, from one of his greatest albums! With the late, great, Mick Ronson on guitar!
Imagine today trying to release song about a mass terrorist attack on a US city, told from the point of view of an acomplice.
If it were done today, they would have blamed it on the influence of the “blah” people and their rippity-rap and hippity-hop.
You know – “knicker” music!
I was thinking the same thing.
Well, there is this, now eleven years old.
mick ronson, secret weapon; without his guitar, bowie just ain’t bowie. listen to width of a circle and tell me you didn’t poop your pants.
I think it was Dave Marsh, music critic for Rolling Stone, who in his Rolling Stone review of the album said something along the lines of ‘he’d blow David Bowie if that’s what it took to hear “Jean Genie” again.
I think he should have said Ronson instead.
ha, well, bowie would have probably taken him up on the offer. ronson would have punched him in the nose.
/taking your comment too literally
Except for those albums from Berlin and Scary Monsters, all of which were better than Aladdin Sane.
now we got a conversation!
yeah, but it’s not just aladdin sane. ronson also played a big part of the man who sold the world, hunky dory, and ziggy stardust. so, you got the ziggy-era bowie vs thin white duke-era bowie. which, shit, how do you even pick? bowie’s four greatest albums vs bowie’s other four greatest albums, steel cage death match. while lodger is my favorite bowie (soft spot in me heart, picked it up on vinyl at some point probably cuz it was the only bowie album they had, loved it ever since), i gotta lean ziggy era on this. if only for the numbers game; more great songs produced. of course this is subjective. bowie’s work with eno and verlaine is the shit, too.
ronson also produced transformer, that’s gotta count for something, right, even if not bowie? mott the hoople, too.
a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, i saw bowie on danish tv. they asked him to play a tune (i suppose, i don’t speak danish), he said ‘well, i got this old mick ronson guitar riff that we never put on record’ and proceeded to play the chunkiest groove that you’ve ever (never?) heard. and didn’t make the cut. he had meaty riffs to spare, like ‘oh you like that one, take it, that’s just what i came up with takin a crap this morning.’
i will amend my previous statement. ‘without ronson’s guitar, ziggy-era bowie just ain’t bowie (and thin white duke era bowie probably never occurs, due to the warping of space-time, bowie dies the coolest pauper who ever lived)’
I like Mick Ronson a lot, but I think those earlier albums sound way more dated. Part of that advantage must be that the later albums are weirder. Song advantage is a different thing as Low/Heroes have a lot of not-songs. For guitar I tend to prefer shrieking craziness, so the clanging and scraping on Lodger and Scary Monsters is more satisfying and interesting than the rock moves everybody else in the glam sphere was doing (or imitating) through the Bowie/Ronson period.
i wouldn’t go as far as to say ‘dated’, but i do agree that the sound of bowie’s early 70′s albums are more tied to their time (glam rock equals early 70′s). the berlin albums could have been made at any time (well, at any time from when they were made until the present ha).
me, i’m a big sucker for a sweet guitar riff. a fat guitar groove for me is like what a shiny wiggly thing is for a fish. i guess that’s why they call it the hook! badumbum
the berlin albums could have been made at any time
That’s my opinion as well…there’s not a 70s Bowie album that I don’t love, but the Berlin trilogy to me was really Bowie’s artistic peak. None of which takes away from the sheer gargantuan awesomeness of Panic in Detroit.
Now where the hell is Halloween Jack to provide the definitive take?
I actually prefer Aladin Sane and Hunky Dory to either the Eno trilogy or Svary Monsters, although they’re all great. Also, allow me to mention Station to Station here…
Great fucking song.
That’s it, exactly.
The salvation of the American auto industry – not just keeping them alive through the bad times, but the restructuring that turned them around and made them viable, sustainable, going concerns – is a massive refutation of ever market-fetishist, small-government, Invisible Hand ideological argument ever made. The intervention of government was not only supposed to fail to genuinely turn around GM, but it was supposed to make it impossible for such a turnaround to happen. Government can’t do anything right, only the magic of the free market causes good things to happen in private industry, you know the patter – you’ve had it jammed down your throat for thirty years. This was the heart of Romney’s NYT editorial.
Well, they were WRONG. For Mitt Romney to admit this would be to acknowledge not just that he answered a question wrong, but that the entire foundation of the free-market world view is lacking.
Joe,
It’s the same mentality that has wrong-headed economists the world over sticking to their austerity rhetoric, despite the fact that it not only NOT working, it’s causing even more difficulty.
Somewhere along the line, economists, like conservative politicians with policy, started to treat their subject matter like theologians do God and their beliefs.
They search for evidence to reinforce their beliefs.
To do otherwise, believe the evidence and question your beliefs, would mean that you, and your entire world view, are dead wrong.
And so, belief in austerity, like belief in Jesus, will save them.
And the rest of us can all go to Hell!
I think you’re blaming economists for the sins of politicians.
Yup – you may well be right! :-)
No, he’s not far off. I’ve spent some time amongst economists (as a lowly adjunct professor intruding upon their hallowed departments) and they really do see their ideology as fact. This is, in my opinion, the result of economics losing focus as an actual social science and instead seeking parity with physics, at least in terms of the amount of respect practitioners command. To do that, they abandoned any pretense of interest in how people actually behave in favor of differential equations.
Naturally, this approach has made economists even less respected, generally speaking, than pretty much every practitioner of a “hard science” discipline.
Of course, joe, you are also right that it’s not the fault of economists that certain politicians have picked up their delusions and run with them. But it is to the everlasting shame of the discipline that almost nobody tried to stop them.
(And yes, there are definitely exceptions to this rule. But by and large it is a depressing field to work in, mainly because of all the deluded wankers.)
I get that economists have gotten too full of themselves, but I don’t think it’s right to attribute the austerity craze in particular to them. Very few economists, from what I’ve seen, have been pushing that line. Quite the opposite, the value of stimulus during economic slowdowns has been gospel to economics across the political spectrum.
Leaving aside the Austrians, of course, which is always a good idea.
I think a lot of the cause for this is the influence of the Religious Right, after Reagan brought them into the Republican fold.
They brought their Manichean, black/white good/evil, religious world views into politics and economics.
Now, the Conservatives treat The Constitution like the Bible, and the Founding Fathers like Abraham, Moses, etc.
And the laughable Laffer Curve, and Austrian austerity, as if they were the 10 Commandments.
There is no compromising with God-botherers – and there can be no compromise with Conservative politicians/ Because they’d rather see the whole environmental and economic systems collapse, than admit that they were wrong on any issue.
I would also like to add the news media to the list of people to balme.
The only way “an expert” can ever be wrong anymore is to admit it. No matter how ridiculous your claims or predictions are, if you just stick to your guns, the media establishment will not call you wrong. It’s always, “shape of the Earth, opinions differ.”
This increases the premium for being wrong. Since being wrong is so rare, anyone who is ever wrong is disgraced. Since virtually everyone is always right about everything, who needs someone who has been wrong?
One of the all-time great blog lines, I think from Daniel Davies, goes “The important thing to remember is that the ‘ist’ in ‘economist’ doesn’t act as in ‘scientist’ but as in ‘Trotskyist’.”
1) Its a little early in the game to say that GM has been “geniunely turned around”.
2) Saving GM was still a costly operation.
3) As much as you would like to, I don’t think it is all that easy to separate the GM bailout from, say, the AIG bailout. You are not going to be able to create the sort of government infrastructure necessary to bailout GM without going a long way towards guaranteeing that economic and financial entities that shouldn’t be bailed out will.
4) While I know that the argument was out there, typically free market economists focus on the moral hazards and stagnation this sort of thing causes. Like what was mentioned in the food truck comments, working to support incumbent businesses comes at a steep cost to innovators who may have used those funds to better use.
Free-market sorts tend to focus on the long-term effects of “breaking the rules” so to speak. GM’s near-term profitability does not really refute the free market perspect as it tends to go more along the lines of, “the short-term interference, even if beneficial, is not worth the long-term distortion.”
1) Its a little early in the game to say that GM has been “geniunely turned around”.
And, 364 days ago, you said the same thing. You mangled introductory accounting concepts, and were sure that you had discovered that GM was cooking their books, and that 2010′s profits would be followed by losses. In fact, 2011 was GM’s most profitable year ever.
Please, please, tell me again that this is all about rising AP meaning that they are hiding expenses and debt. Please convince me that your ability to analyze financials is every bit as astute as it was a year ago.
Their interest expenses were wiped out by the bailout and restructuring, they haven’t had any tax expense since the bailout, and their stock price is $8 less than the IPO price and is currently leaving taxpayers on the hook for about $15B (add to that the $15B in tax benefits they received from bankruptcy).
Through all that, its still not all that hard to be unimpressed by $7B in profits.
Their interest expenses were wiped out by the bailout and restructuring,
One of the basic points of a debt restructuring is reducing interest expense, yes. And interest expense was greatly reduced, but not wiped out.
they haven’t had any tax expense since the bailout
Aside from taxes of $672M last year (and this year we do not see details. My guess is because US Corp tax returns for YE 12/31/2011 are due 9/15/12).
(add to that the $15B in tax benefits they received from bankruptcy)
Dear Cthulhu, do you really, truly want to discuss what happens to NOLs in bankruptcy again? Because honestly, and I say this as an accountant, there is no topic that is both more complicated and less interesting than when NOLs are subject to forfeiture.
AS an accountant, you should know by now that there is no accounting for libertarians.
Sadly, and I suspect you know this, a large majority of accountants are themselves either libertarians or some other form of conservative.
I myself was a mildly interested bleeding-heart sort. Then in the fall of 2001 I changed my major from engineering to a double major in economics and finance and the World Trade Center was attacked.
From then on my suspicions that our society was going to shit and that the government would never stop making matters worse have been pretty thouroughly reinforced.
But Brad, are you outraged by Chappaquiddick?
No. I just think we should consider the still lingering benefits of the bailout and restructuring before saying that it GM is a complete success.
They still have tax rates, liability levels, and interest expense that is dramatically lower than anything that GM has run with in the past and lower than their competitors.
1) You’ve got to be kidding me. Their products are successful, they’re immensely profitable, and they are growing and adding jobs. How is that not a turnaround from 2007?
2) The loans have been paid back, and future sale of stock will cover the rest. We’re going to make money on the deal. But, regardless, saving several million jobs is worth something.
3) We didn’t bail out AIG because they deserved it. We bailed them out because they’d become a structural element of our economy, and if they failed, the whole thing would collapse, complete with bank runs and a depression. What we can do, and what Dodd-Frank did, was make sure that, if such bailouts become necessary, the individuals who made it necessary won’t benefit.
4) Stagnation was what GM was doing in the two decades before the bailout. In 2005, they introduced a whole new lineup of cars, calling it “An American Revolution.” They didn’t include a hybrid. Oh, it it failed. Innovation is what GM is doing now, such as the Motor Trend Care of the Year Chevy Volt. We understand the market fetishists’ theory about innovation and incumbents quite well. It was supposed to explain why GM wouldn’t reform itself and become an innovator if it received a bailout. Oops.
That’s funny, because the free-market sorts were assuring me that GM would be back at the edge of a cliff within a couple of years if they’d received a bailout. Might I suggest that free-market sorts tend to focus on long-term effects only when their short- and medium-term predictions are disproved?
I’m not saying that there hasn’t been a turnaround. I just believe the turnaround is due in large part to still having massive competitive advantages from the bailout (and natural disasters).
It took decades of decay from poor management and falling behind in an increasingly difficult industry and a sudden financial shock to bring GM to its knees before. And even then, the Obama administration turned down their restructuring plan and decided to handle it themselves.
I just don’t see a whole lot of reason to believe that the incentives and market factors that lead GM’s management to send the company down the tubes has changed for the better.
It didn’t reform itself. IIRC, the Obama administration denied GM’s plans for restructuring saying that management wouldn’t make the decisions it needed to make. So the government stepped in, wiped out stockholders and some creditors, cleared house in the management, laid off a bunch of workers, and restructured their pension liabilities.
I will freely admit that the government took a large corporation that couldn’t manage itself and brought it back to solid financial ground, I would agree. Tax breaks worth $45B over the next 20 years and massive amounts of debt forgiveness will do that.
Breaking down some financials for GM and competitors:
Total Debt to Equity Ratio:
Ford: 662
Toyota: 120
GM: 34
Revenue to Interest Expense Ratio:
Ford: 30
GM: 248
GM sales for 2011 are 83% of the level that they were in 2007, but they are making enormous profits because the government stepped in and radically changed their capital structure and cut labor costs dramatically.
While their product line has gone from abysmal to competitive, the vast majority of their turnaround doesn’t come from good management. It comes from management so bad that the government felt it had no choice but to wipe the slate clean for it.
If the dog doesn’t like the dog food, a bailout and some bumps in the road for competitors aren’t going to matter. GM products are now desirable, successful products, up and down the product line. Extra money didn’t get rid of those pointless excess brands. Extra money didn’t break their addiction to gas-guzzling mega-SUVs.
Yes, having the public sector take an active hand in managing the restructuring the company did produce much better results than had obtained from private-sector management. Is there a lesson here? Because I remember an awful lot of people – I was a regular at Hit & Run at the time – who told me that having the government involve would lead to worse management, as political pressure would lead to things like, gasp, a more fuel-efficient product line, which would obviously fail because it wasn’t the result of market pressure. Oops.
Oddly enough, this isn’t what small-government types were saying at the time. Back then, a bailout would merely pump up the balance sheet for a time, while preventing the reform of the company and a reversal of its downward trend, since only “market discipline” can do that. Oops.
Wait a moment. Now a bankruptcy is suddenly no longer a result of market forces, but a result of government?
They have no more debt because the were bankrupt. That is the usual result of a bankruptcy.
What in Schumpeters name are you talking about?
That government infrastructure was created for the auto bailout, and for the bank bailouts. Heck, to make the auto bailout happen, Obama had to perform some slight of hand involving GMAC and the TARP bill’s language about “financial institutions” in order to save the auto manufacturers.
This isn’t about existing infrastructure. All of that infrastructure was created on the fly, because of the political will to make it happen.
This is exactly the problem with the small-government-conservative theory about keeping government small as a way to ward off big interventions: if the politics demand such a power, such an infrastructure, it is created for that purpose. Making government small is not an effective way to keep wealthy interests from using government for their ends. Frankly, it probably makes the government easier prey.
This is not true.
TARP didn’t really add infrastructure, it just authorized a new expansive use of existing infrastructure. It was simply congressional permission for the secretary of the Treasury and the Board of the Reserve to begin buying up massive amounts of bullshit securities no one could sell. And it was Bush Jr. that exploited the vagaries of TARP to start supporting GM.
I think Romney’s just been driven mad like so many of the Republicans by the fact that Obama governs like a moderate Republican in many ways. It seems as if there’s a set distance they must keep from Obama(50 paces?)so that every time he takes a nice big step toward the “middle,” they scream and back up. Now they’ve backed off a cliff, and we’re all supposed to pretend like this is normal behavior. “No, managed bankruptcy is the only way! That’s what you did? It’s Obamaruptcy! And the end of the worrrrrrllllldddd!”
this is the part of the show where wile e coyote looks down and sees that he’s standing on nothing but thin air. that little umbrella ain’t gonna save you, mittens.
It’s like a political horror movie. The Overton Window gained sentience and started feeding on its handlers.
Except that the Overton window was moved significantly in the direction of government intervention into industry over the past four years by the success of the auto bailout.
Support for the measure was below 40% when Obama did it, and now it’s at 60%.
So I’m suppose to vote for this guy because he has the business experience to solve the economic crisis even though, for whatever reason, he was wrong on the biggest industrial policy decision of the last decade?
This should kneecap his entire narrative. Too bad no one can run to Mitt’s (or Robert Taft’s) left on economic issues.
It would be both mean and cruel to point out that Mittens was not the only person completely wrong about GM.
the ball cupping warped his mind.
It would explain the libertarianism in someone who otherwise seems to have a functioning mind.
Re-reading that thread, I see that tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of joe telling Brad he would mock him again in a year for his “little batch of bitterness.”
Are you going to wait until tomorrow, joe, or are you going to take advantage of today’s thread to jump the gun a bit?
I always say that shit, but you know what?
Living well really is the best revenge.
And by “living well,” I mean “spending years making casual references to the episode where the person who got their prediction so wrong has to see them.”
Tags: DADT Repeal, Libyan Stalemate, Iraq Withdrawal, Pssht Millertime
While you’re here, I would like to ask you about some things:
http://quotes.wsj.com/GM/financials/annual/income-statement
1) From that income statement, is that 31B in deferred domestic income taxes taxes that they paid down in 2007 or taxes that they deferred in 2007.
2) How is their net income in 2009 higher than their sales?
3) For three years running, their net income is higher than their pre-tax income. If they were paying taxes at a typical rate, what would you guess their income tax expense would be?
You are asking better questions this year.
1) Deferred Tax Expense on an income statement is (and I’m simplifying quite a bit here) taxes that would be paid this year, except that IRS profit is different from GAAP profit (and that is true for every company that exists, and is not particular to GM), so they will get paid in a later year. Any taxes deferred in 2007 would either have been paid by now (most likely guess) or still be a liability (unlikely).
2) There is a large credit to Unusual Expense in 2009. While I would need to see Notes to be sure, I would guess that that is debt forgiveness.
3) I know that I am not competent to say what a “typical” tax rate is on a multi-national entity the size and scope of GM.
Thank you.
Can you distill this for me? I think it answers my question, but I can’t really make it out.
Okay, so some of this relates to international transactions, and I am not vaguely competent to answer that. But I will give you a more general background:
Profit under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) is never ever the same as profit per the IRS. The IRS allows certain expenses GAAP does not (most importantly accellerated depreciation) and disallows expenses GAAP allows (most importantly expenses accrued, but not paid after 8.5 months) (and most, but not all, of these differences reverse out over time). IRS profit is much closer to cash-basis accounting than GAAP is, as a general rule.
Deferred tax expense is a way of estimating what taxes would have been, if the IRS followed GAAP. It is always an estimate. This Note says that they estimated too high (and the goal is to always err on the side of overstating expense, so this is actually a good error to have made), and they are now fixing the error.
Thank you.
Admittedly, I came into the discussion you linked to above misinformed.
You could’ve at least linked to this comment.
I’m taking some grief on here for being wrong, and I take constant grief for being overly dogmatic, but I will admit to being wrong when it is made plain that I am.
So do you admit now having been wrong one year ago?
Yes. I was wrong. GM generally has a good product line and has a very good financial position.
It still has a very tough road to travel, and its stock price has reflected that.