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...That isn't to say Daewoo's demise wasn't painful. The government and banks stage-managed Daewoo's unwinding to soften the blow to the economy. The group was broken apart. Some assets were sold. (Ironically, GM acquired some of Daewoo's car company.) Other affiliates got debt restructurings; a government agency bought up Daewoo loans from the financial sector at a discount. Billions were lost. But the whole concept that Daewoo was too big to fail proved false. The reality was that Daewoo had become more burden than boon. Many of the loans it had gobbled up were...
...familiar?) made necessary by the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis. And the timing also could not have been worse: the economy was emerging from its deepest recession since Korea's accelerated growth began in the early 1960s. Arguably, a Daewoo collapse was more threatening to Korea than, say, a GM bankruptcy would be to the U.S., simply because the Korean economy is so much smaller. Daewoo had about $50 billion in revenues. The entire South Korean gross domestic product in 1999 was only $450 billion. (GM, by comparison, had $181 billion in revenues in 2007, while U.S. GDP reached...
...calling GM and Chrysler zombies. Nor am I predicting that the U.S. economy will glide effortlessly through a crisis at the Big Three. But history tells us that no firm is completely indispensable to a national economy, no matter how much of an institution it appears to be. Nor do firms need to be preserved in exactly the form in which we all know them. Any time a giant, money-losing corporation fails, the results are ugly. But the outcome may still look better than a zombie...
President Bush's fiscal lifeline for GM and Chrysler, announced at the White House Friday morning, amounts to a $13.4 billion handoff to the incoming Administration of President-elect Obama. The deal is rife with indistinct targets the automakers must meet to avoid being forced to repay the loan in three months, squishy conditions for union sacrifices and a deadline that can be changed under numerous circumstances. And of course the entire thing can be renegotiated at will by the incoming Administration...
...Thursday night, Treasury's interim chief investment officer of the $700 billion bailout fund, Jim Lambright, and his team of crisis managers hunkered down with representatives of GM and Chrysler and worked all night to finalize the details of the deal. The result does its best to impose order on what would otherwise be the disorderly bankruptcies of the two companies, but in many regards it just passes the buck to Obama. To be fair, Treasury had but a week to address an incredibly complex problem and come up with a multibillion-dollar aid package - no small achievement, however lacking...