Where Mitt Was Born and Raised: “Public Nuisance,” “Blight”

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Mitt Romney just made a totally dickish comment at a campaign event in Commerce, MI:

No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place where we were born and raised.

Here’s what you need to know about “where Mitt was born and raised.” It was razed, two years ago, after having been declared a “public nuisance” and “blight.”

Granted, the house was no longer owned by his family. Nevertheless, I can think of no better symbol for Mitt than the way Detroit’s glorious past has been destroyed after vulture capitalists like him outsourced the area’s jobs and then allowed the city to fall into ruin.

Remember, when Mitt said, “let Detroit go bankrupt,” he was also condemning “where he was born and raised.”

The Gray Lady Falls Off the Balance Beam

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Granted, it pertains to my right-wing governor, so it’s personal. But this NYT profile of Rick Snyder is a remarkable example of the perverse journalistic fetish for “balance” gone so badly awry it amounts to disinformation.

Let’s start with this summarized claim.

Republicans and business leaders here widely praise Mr. Snyder, crediting him with balancing the state’s once-troubled budget, dumping a state business tax and presiding over an employment rebound in a state that not long ago had the highest jobless rate in the nation. [my emphasis]

You’d think a newspaper might want to point out that MI’s unemployment actually turned around in August 2009–well before Snyder’s election in 2010 and not coincidentally the month after GM came out of bankruptcy. Unemployment dropped 3.3% before Snyder took over, dropped a further 2.6% after he did. But more significantly, unemployment in MI has started to creep up again–it’s up .7% since its recent low in April, to 9%.

Setting that record straight is critical to the rest of the article, since it repeatedly gushes about Rick Snyder refusing to deny Obama credit for MI’s turnaround.

Just before the Republican primary in Michigan in February, Mr. Snyder was asked in an interview whether Mr. Obama ought to be given credit for the state’s economic improvements. “I don’t worry about blame or credit,” he said. “It’s more about solving the problem.”

Nowhere in the article does “reporter” Monica Davey consider the possibility that Obama–and, in fact, Jennifer Granholm–have more to do with the turnaround than Snyder. Yet even many Republicans in this state would grant that the successful bailout of Chrysler and GM had a lot to do with the turnaround (though Republicans almost universally ignore the energy jobs Obama focused on MI).

So maybe Snyder refuses to deny Obama credit because such a claim would not be credible? It’s not a possibility the NYT article–which is supposed to be a celebration of a lack of ideology–even considers.

Which brings me to the other area where NYT’s idea of what constitutes balance is completely whacked: its treatment of the right to organize.

Read more →

“They Were Suspending My Credit Line”

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[youtube]pf7Cxj5BZw8[/youtube]

So Mitt is still trying to dig himself out of the hole he created when he declared, “Let Detroit go bankrupt”?

I suspect most of the commentary on this ad will focus on the irony that, had Mitt had his way, all of GM’s dealers would have gone under, and without the buyout deals they ultimately got.

Me, I’m a bit surprised that Mitt didn’t choose an IN Chrysler dealer. Not only did Chrysler offer its dealers a much stingier package, but some dealers from IN fought losing their franchises all the way to SCOTUS, and some are still suing over “takings.”

But I’m most surprised by the sparse language used here to portray a dealer closure: “I received a letter from General Motors: they were suspending my credit line.”

Credit lines?!?!? Mitt wants to tug at heart strings and hit Obama with an attack akin to the Bain attacks that are working so well in swing states by invoking credit lines?!?!? Really?

Yes, it is true that at the heart of any car dealer is a credit line. But by including that in this ad, it seems to me, Mitt does several things. It reminds everyone who knows what role a credit line plays in a car dealer that the precipitating cause of the auto crash was the credit crash. It reminds viewers that the banksters, in killing their own industry, also killed the car industry. And not just any banksters, either. In GM’s case, the bankster in question was 51% owned by Cerberus Capital, a bunch of high profile Republicans (Dan Quayle and John Snow, among others) who were trying to do what Mitt got rich off: looting companies (in Cerberus’ case, including Chrysler) while profiting from the financialization that such looting offered. Only they were so bad at it, they effectively had to be bailed out by the taxpayers along with GM and Chrysler.

Thus, the villain in this ad–at least as described by the dealer–is someone just like Mitt, only stupider. The villain in the ad is not Obama–not to people who know how the auto industry works. It’s Mitt’s stupid Republican friends.

Bahrain Drain: Oppressive US Client State Sucks The Life Out Of Formula One

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[UPDATE] Qualifying went off without much hitch this morning, at least inside the circuit. Outside the circuit, the body of a protester was found, dead after a night of clashes with government authorities and police. Inside the confines of the circuit, Sebastian Vettel regained qualifying form and took his first pole of the season, followed by Lewis Hamilton, Mark Webber and Jenson Button. Schumacher didn’t even manage to get out of Q1. Unlike the desolate practice yesterday, there were at least some fans observable in the main grandstand for qualifying today. But the scene was still as bleak and lifeless as I have ever seen for a F1 Grand Prix. It remains an embarrassment for FIA and the teams (FOTA) to be in Bahrain. And, as I pointed out yesterday, the lie that FIA and Bernie Ecclestone comfort themselves with – that they are being non-political by going and not giving in to international political concerns – is absurd and outrageous. The oppressive Sunni minority and the ruling Khalifa clan are using the mere presence of F1 in Sakhir to paint the picture that everything is okay with the Shia majority in Bahrain. It is not, and F1 looks like a tool. – bmaz 10:30 am EST Sat Apr. 21

Formula One is in Bahrain. There is no good reason, save for greed, that Formula One is in Bahrain this weekend but, nevertheless, there it is. As I write this report, practice is underway. The most expensive and technologically sophisticated racing motorcars in the world are on the track and at speed. The factory Mercedes of Nico Rosberg and Michael Schumacher are fighting with the Red Bulls of Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber for the fast times in practice. Ferrari and McLaren are trying to catch up.

The scene is surreal in how vacant and empty it is. There are no people, no crowds, no passenger cars in the surrounding lots, no motorhomes in the infield. There is no party. There is no circus. There are no people. F1 is not lovingly referred to by longtime aficionados as “the circus” for nothing, it is the circus. F1 brings the press, the families, the hangers on, the beautiful women, the beautiful people – and the press that follow them. It is a traveling roadshow party of epic proportions, and always has been.

But not now, not today, not in Bahrain. The cars are there, and there are apparently drivers piloting them, but save for the team engineers and pit hands, there does not appear to be a living sole at the Bahrain International Circuit in Sakhir. It looks like a scene from The Twilight Zone where all the people have been disappeared from the face of the earth.

It might have been like this last year, but Bahrain was yanked from the F1 calendar, with the sport’s godfather like mafia don, Bernie Ecclestone, lamely saying at the time:

“The truth of the matter is we put the calendar together and the teams race on the calendar,” he said. “We were trying to help Bahrain, who have been very helpful to Formula One, and hoping they could get themselves sorted out.

“I don’t know whether there is peace or not. I have no idea. The FIA sent somebody out to check and they said it was all OK. I think the teams had different information and they have the right to say they don’t want to change the calendar.”

The truth of the matter was that it pained Ecclestone greatly to not give Bahrain, and its heavy handed ruling Khalifa family, its cherished F1 race last year, and Bernie and the F1 moneychangers were not about to skip it a second year, so there they are.

I know people whose life it is to follow F1 and document it, it is their profession. It was their father’s profession before them. It is their life. They are not in Bahrain. Presumably, as effectively permanent attachments to the sport, they could have gotten in; they just refused to go. Just having the option is more than most journalists can say. From the AFP:

Bahrain has denied visas to foreign journalists and photographers, including from AFP, to cover this Sunday’s controversial Grand Prix race.

An AFP photographer, accredited by the sport’s governing body, the FIA (Federation Internationale de l’Automobile), was informed by Bahrain’s information affairs authority that there has been a “delay to your visa application, so it might not be processed.”

Associated Press said two of its Dubai-based journalists were prevented from covering the Grant Prix because they could not receive entry visas, despite being accredited by the FIA.

Meanwhile, cameramen already in Bahrain were required to keep fluorescent orange stickers on their cameras so that they would be easily recognisable to ensure they do not cover any off-track events, such as ongoing protests.

What might the journalists report on were they allowed in Bahrain? Maybe the petrol bomb attack members of the Force India racing team were caught up in. The incident so shook the team that it Read more →

Mitt Advocates Taking Healthcare from Retirees to Give Money to Bailed Out Banks

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Someone gave Mitt Romney a shovel just in time to dig shit snow in MI for the next two weeks. There’s a lot that is fact-impaired in this op-ed doubling down on the “let GM go bankrupt” (starting with the lack of funding for a bankruptcy, meaning a managed bankruptcy was impossible).

By the spring of 2009, instead of the free market doing what it does best, we got a major taste of crony capitalism, Obama-style.

Thus, the outcome of the managed bankruptcy proceedings was dictated by the terms of the bailout. Chrysler’s “secured creditors,” who in the normal course of affairs should have been first in line for compensation, were given short shrift, while at the same time, the UAWs’ union-boss-controlled trust fund received a 55 percent stake in the firm.

He’s complaining, of course, that VEBA (the trust fund run by professionals that allowed the auto companies to spin off contractual obligations–retiree healthcare–to the unions) got a stake in Chrysler while Chrysler’s secured creditors took a haircut.

So, in part, he’s basically complaining that the bailout preserved the healthcare a bunch of 55+ year old blue collar workers were promised. He’s pissed they got to keep their healthcare.

He’s also complaining that banks took a haircut, as would happen in any managed bankruptcy.

But it’s more than that. He’s complaining that a bunch of banks that themselves had been bailed out had to take a haircut. He’s complaining, for example, that JP Morgan Chase, Chrysler’s largest creditor at the time and the recipient, itself, of $68.6B in bailout loans, had to take a haircut on $2B in loans to Chrysler.

Mitt’s op-ed makes him sound a lot like Jimmy Lee, Chase’s top negotiator on the auto bailout, who,

demanded to know why, if the government thought banks important enough to give them tens of billions in TARP money, it wanted to squeeze them on [the Chrysler] deal.

I guess Mitt, too, thinks the banks are so important they should take precedence over retiree healthcare, too.

But as the kind of bankster who, at Bain, relied on government subsidies to fund his “restructurings” that ended up taking people’s jobs and healthcare, that’s not all that surprising.

Still, the UAW retirees who still have healthcare today instead of Jamie Dimon having another yacht probably don’t feel the same way as Mitt does.

Scary Car Broker Plot and the Fifth Amendment

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I’ve always been skeptical of the Scary Car Broker Plot–the suit against a bunch of used car brokers and others based on the claim that the entire thing is a money laundering operation for Hezbollah. At the core of the complaint is the allegation that entities that weren’t listed on Treasury’s sanctions list until early last year transferred money between 2007 and early last year (that is, until they were listed) to purchase used cars in the US.

Between approximately January 2007 and early 2011, at least $329 million was transferred by wire from accounts held in Lebanon at LCB, Federal Bank of Lebanon (“Federal Bank”), Middle East and Africa Bank (“MEAB”), and BLOM Bank (“BLOM”) to the United States through their correspondent bank accounts with U.S. financial institutions located in the Southern District of New York and elsewhere for the purchase of used cars.

But one of the main targets of the complaint–one they don’t actually get to until page 46 of a 65-page complaint–are thirty seemingly Lebanese-American owned car brokers in the US.

In describing these brokers, the complaint seems to offer little perspective on how this business–a perfectly legitimate business designed to get clunkers into countries where they still have market value–normally operates.

The businesses of these Car Buyers typically have little or no property or assets other than bank accounts that are used to receive wires from overseas to buy cars, and to purchase used cars at auction. These cars are then transported to shipping ports, where they are shipped to West Africa. The Car Buyers typically do not have offices, car lots, or an inventory of used cars other than cars that are in transit to the ports. Some of the Car Buyers purchase cars for their own account, but others simply retain a fee of a few hundred dollars for each car that they buy.

That is, the complaint suggests that the marginal nature of these businesses, by itself, makes these businesses sketchy. But it offers no proof for that fact (and I believe that a lot of these businesses are sketchy by design–they’re the automotive equivalent of recyclers who pick through trash to try to find things with ongoing value).

In the section laying out the individual descriptions of the middle men who dealt with the car brokers, there are a lot of assertions of direct and more attenuated ties to Hezbollah with little or no proof.

Nevertheless, the goal of this complaint is to seize money from the auto brokers, about whom the complaint makes no claims of knowledge of ties to Hezbollah.

Since the complaint, I’ve just been assuming that maybe the government has better evidence to tie the American businesses they’re effectively shutting down to Hezbollah (nevermind that the ties have always been closer to Colombian drug cartels).

But yesterday, Al-Jazeera had a long article poking a bunch more holes in the case. Read more →

Big Kitty Cats On The Prowl & Talking Trash In Detroit Motor City

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[Hi there Kitty Kat fans!! The tigers are tied with the Rangers in the 9th and the Lions coming on soon. Time to Prowl, so Trash has been moved back up to where it can be found – bmaz]

The big cats are on the prowl, and they are growling right on down Woodward Avenue. Los Tigres are Looking For Love and they’re Making Thunderbirds.

And they are not the ever lovely Watertiger kind of kitties either. Nope, these kittehs are big, bad, lean, mean and will Fuck. You. Up.

Detroit Motor City is happenin baybee; seriously happening, and here is hoping there is no Detroit Breakdown.

First on the catwalk are the Tigers. Los Tigres dispatched the evil empire of the NY Yankees. Fittingly, the game, and series, ended with a strikeout by Mighty Casey LeBron Rodriquez, aka “Mr. April”. Congratulations pinstripe pushers, you have 6, count em six, more years of this joy at the low, low price of only $27 million a year. Worry not though, while he has already been through Kate Hudson and Cameron Diaz, you still have the ARoid and Gwyneth Paltrow hookup to look forward to. So you got that going for you, along with you new number one starter, AJ Burnett, after CC Sabathia bails. Red Sawx cognoscenti feast. As to everybody else, ponder whether there is enough Justin Verlander to slow down Josh Hamilton, Michael Young and the Rangers. Say what you will, these are, at this point, the two best teams in the American League.

In the Senior Circuit, my local kids, and they are kids since they are the youngest team in MLB, came up just a bit short tonight against the BrewCrew. Awesome game five, and awesome series. Both teams just had so much personality and good vibe, it was hard to root against either one. But someone had to win, and in extra innings in the win or go home game, Milwaukee did. And Albert Pujols and the Cards shocked the mighty Phillies, in Philly, to make the unlikely advance to the NLCS. This is almost certainly not the NLCS matchup FoxTV hoped for. Too bad, both teams earned it, suck on that Fox.

In the college gridiron type of sporting activity, a couple of has beens like Texas and Oklahoma are playing. If only they both could lose. Then the better and more appealing team, the Boise State Broncos, could move ahead to the rank they deserve in the standings. Especially after dropping 57 points on conference rival Fresno State Friday night. The most exciting team in the country as far as supposed first tier conferences go, the sharp toothed Wisconsin Badgers, have a bye week.

Next on the beautific catwalk are the Deetroit Lions. These too are some slinky cats.

The Chicago Poo Bears are going to mosey into the Lion’s Den at Ford Field, where the Kitties hope to say “Suh you later”. So far, so good, Matt Stafford is still healthy and leading the Lion offense. Stafford’s resume is spotty because of injury, but when healthy, he has clearly demonstrated he is a top-flite quarterback. Javed Best is a nice back, but the Lions might want to invest in another back at some point to insure the future that seems so bright. As good as the Lions’ defense has been so far this season, they have been playing without what many considered the best athlete in the draft, Nick Fairly out of Auburn. Dude has the potential to be another Suh. If he is even close, it is hard to imagine what it will mean to Detroit, and he may make his season debut against Da Bears.

I understand there may be other games of both the student and professional athlete variety, but if they ain’t from Detroit, you will have to supply your own analysis in comments. Because this is Motor City Madness Weekend!

Well, okay, maybe we will get to non-motorcity talk because, if nothing else, there is some shit going down in Suzuka. And if you know squat about F1, you know there is usually wet, and corresponding wild, in Suzuka. That’s just the way it is. Vettel was off pace in practice, but was fast and took pole in qualifying, with Jenson Button of McLaren in P2. Lewis Hamilton hung on for P3 followed by Mass and Alonso in the Ferraris. True to form, qualifying was off schedule due to rain. We will see yet what the conditions are for the actual race, but I have always found the wet to be a good thing at Suzuka as it seems a bit pedestrian of a track without it. The race goes off at 2:00am EST and 11:00pm PST and is being carried in the US by Speed TV. If Vettel finishes anywhere in the points, even with the minimal single point, he clinches the Drivers’ Championship, and that is a pretty safe bet to occur.

As you may have noticed, this is a VERY heavy music Trash post. But, if there is one thing Detroit is known for other than American steel on wheels, it is music. I didn’t roll with the common Motown motif, and I did not fall back on old friends that used to be from Detroit, but now are here in the desert. If you are a music nerd, check out the enantiomer MC5 version of Motor City Is Burning. Not sure exactly what the deal is, but it is clearly, whether intentionally or unintentionally, a reverse print if you look at all the right handed people flipped opposite. Weird. Probably not many people remember the MC5, but they were one of the early foundations of straight up hard rock, and they were dead nuts killer.

So, that is it for the Motown Trash. Burn it down!

Italian Grand Prix 1961-2011: Monza, Death of von Trips & A Yankee Champion

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When we started the 2011 Formula One season back in March, I noted that 2011 is the 50th anniversary of the magical 1961 F1 season in which Phil Hill, driving for Ferrari, became the first, and other than Mario Andretti in 1978, only American Formula One Grand Prix World Champion. From our season opening post in March, Circus Starts Anew, 50 Years On From the Yankee Champion:

As starts the 2011 Formula One season, so too started the 1961 F1 season fifty years ago. For all the differences brought by technology and time over five decades, there is much in common. The excitement and anticipation of the drivers, the longing to put the knowledge of the off season testing and tech changes finally to proof in actual race conditions, the first drivers’ meetings of the season, the beautiful people and the eyes of the international sporting world focused. There is nothing like the Formula One circus; that was the case then as much as it is now.

Longtime regulars here at the Emptywheel Trash Talk threads will likely remember that I had the privilege of knowing Phil Hill as I was growing up. Phil was the first, and still one of only two (Mario Andretti), Americans to win the Formula One Grand Prix World Championship and his career was immortalized in the excellent biography Yankee Champion by William Nolan. 2011 is the fiftieth anniversary of his championship season. In honor of that, I will be comparing and remembering the races and excitement of the 1961 season over the course of the current season. See here for some simply superb [Cahier Archive] photos from the 1961 season.

Phil was my friend, and my mentor. I miss him.

Phil Hill German GP 1961 - Cahier Archive

This will be the last formal installment in the 1961 retrospective series. While there are 19 races in this year’s 2011 F1 schedule, with six remaining after the Italian, there were only eight races on the 1961 docket. The Italian was the seventh and penultimate race, and the one that will not only live in infamy, but in which the Championship was determined. Indeed, with both the Driver’s and Constructor’s Championships decided at Monza in the Italian, and in light of the tragic death of their star factory driver, Count Wolfgang von Trips, the dominant Ferrari team did not even travel the Atlantic to contest the final race, the inaugral United States Grand Prix at Watkins Glen, NY.

So, in 1961 all the marbles came down to the famed steep banked course at Autodromo Nazionale Monza, Read more →

The Auto Industry and America’s Future

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I wanted to point to four different discussions as a way to situate a larger discussion of where the auto industry is at:

The automotive industry is driving the recovery (such as it is)

As the LAT argues–most compellingly with this graphic–the rebound in auto manufacturing in this country is one of the best pieces of news in our economy today.

It actually points to both automotive sales–with dealers doing good business–and an increase in manufacturing in this country. Those are two different things.

The story points to a GM dealer with stores in three states talking about his business.

“I have been adding dozens of employees for sales and sales support,” said Mike Bowsher, who owns Chevrolet and Buick dealerships in Atlanta; Nashville, Tenn.; and Orlando, Fla. “The economy is crazy, but our retail business is still growing and getting better.”

There are likely a couple of things going on. First, remember that GM and Chrysler closed a lot of dealers during their restructuring. I’ve long argued that was a necessary step because American brand dealers were cannibalizing each others’ sales. We would expect those that remain–like Bowsher’s dealers–to be doing better as a result. And US brands (including Ford) also did well during the post-earthquake period when Toyota and Honda had shortages due.

But then there’s the manufacturing side, where LAT notes a number of manufacturers are expanding here.

And it’s not just the Big Three American manufacturers that are thriving. Nissan, VW and other foreign-based firms are expanding in the United States, putting billions of dollars into building and refurbishing plants. Start-ups Tesla Motors in Palo Alto, Fisker Automotive in Anaheim and Coda Automotive in L.A. are hiring and spending hundreds of millions of dollars designing and launching electric and hybrid vehicles.

We’ve got an entire new segment–electric vehicles–expanding into viable production runs at the same time as we’re seeing transplants open new factories. Transplants are coming here, in part, to minimize the disruption of volatility in currency exchange. But I would expect it to become easier to justify opening plants in this country now that the Japanese earthquake showed the fragility of existing supply chains. Also note that US wages are more competitive internationally.

If only our country had done something meaningful to bring down the costs corporations pay on health care, we’d probably see a lot more manufacturing opening here.

And while I’m skeptical of David Shulman’s claim that the automotive turnaround will single-handedly keep us out of a double dip–after all, the beleaguered middle class drives the volume in car sales…

The health of the U.S. economy is so dependent on autos that economists such as UCLA’s David Shulman are watching car sales to assess whether the nation’s recovery will accelerate or stall.

“If you see a 13-million-unit sales rate in the fourth quarter, that would help a lot,” said Shulman, senior economist at the UCLA Anderson Forecast. “It would be very hard to see how the U.S. would go into recession with cars selling at that rate.”

I do think it fair to assess the role of the automotive industry in what little recovery we’ve got.

Battery factories driving the manufacturing industry

Which brings us to this excellent article from yesterday’s NYT Magazine. It tells the story I wish Obama had told when he visited Johnson Controls a few weeks back: the Administration’s investments in battery factories in the stimulus bill are coming on-line and they offer perhaps the single best piece of good news in the economy.

It talks about how the US fell behind in this and other critical manufacturing segments.

The semiconductor industry, for example, led to the LED-lighting and solar-panel industries, both of which are mostly based in Asia now. “The battery is another fascinating example,” [Harvard Professor Gary] Pisano told me. “The center of gravity is Asia. But why?” If you go back to the 1960s, he says, the American consumer-electronics companies decided they were better off in Japan, and then Korea, where costs were lower. “And then you have to ask: Who had the incentives to make batteries smaller or more powerful or last longer? Not the car industry. The consumer-electronics industry did.” This explains why the U.S. is now playing catch-up with lithium-ion batteries. It also underscores the vulnerability of an economy with a shrinking manufacturing sector. “When one industry moves,” Pisano says, “there can be other industries in the future that follow it that you couldn’t even anticipate.”

It talks about how we’re having to do what developing countries have always done to catch up: copycat existing technology (even though, as is the case here, our superior research universities led the development of the technology).

Its battery technology was developed at M.I.T., and for the last several years, the company had been making its lithium-ion cells in factories in Korea and China. When I asked Jason Forcier, the head of A123’s automotive division, why the company went to Asia to make its products, Forcier said he had no choice. “That’s where the supply base was,” he said. “That’s where the know-how was — it was nonexistent in the U.S.”

Repatriating a high-tech manufacturing plant to the United States is not simply a matter of hiring the local talent. It requires good-old foreign know-how. “We call it ‘copy exact,’ ” Forcier said. “We bought a company in Korea that had the technology around this type of battery and had developed the manufacturing process there. We basically brought that here, copied it exactly and scaled it up.” A123 also brought a team of six Korean engineers to help transfer the technology to the U.S. and sent a team of Americans to Korea to learn.

Read more →

The Other Auto Bailout: Ford, Toyota, … and Harley Davidson?

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As I noted yesterday, Bloomberg has made some really cool visual tools showing the lending the Fed did over the years.

So I wanted to use it to show the other auto bailout: lending to Ford and Toyota at a time when the auto market was fragile and credit was scarce.

Showing them side-by-side makes it clear that at the same time the government was discounting GM and Chrysler’s claim that unavailability of credit was a big part of their woes (and making them beg harder to get credit from the government), the Fed was providing credit to both Ford and Toyota.

Though you need to go further to see why the companies were taking the loans. The Ford image shows that it took the loans at a time when its market capitalization was in the toilet (remember its stock mirrored that of GM, and ostensibly to help GM out Ford participated in the testimony to Congress).So at the peak (and also around the time Chrysler was going into bankruptcy) the loans were worth almost 175% of Ford’s market value.

Note these loans were to Ford Credit: most likely, this reflects Ford relying on government loans to extend credit to its dealers to keep product moving.

Toyota’s loans, however, represented a much smaller percentage of its market value (which never fell as much as the others) and were significantly smaller than the loans Ford took out. But the loans also came during the period when Chrysler and GM were under the greatest stress.

Not surprisingly, Toyota paid off these loans more quickly than Ford did, in 148 days as compared to 323.

Ford and Toyota weren’t the only auto industry companies getting loans. BMW also had over $4B in loans, at times up to 27% of its value. There’s a $1.7B loan to Chrysler Financial (AKA Cerberus).

Perhaps the biggest surprise of all of this are Harley-Davidson’s $1.3B loans, at times over half its market value.

Now, I’m no expert on the motorcycle business. But like the auto business, it depends on moving product (both vehicles and parts) to independently operated dealers, which in turn rely on credit. So like the auto industry, the credit crunch resulting from the crash must have devastated it.

Add in the fact that, like GM, H-D ended up restructuring. It was also revamping its manufacture; it was also restructuring its labor agreements. It also had had profit woes which hit its stock price. Which made fall 2008 a shitty time to lose access to credit.

But unlike GM, it got Fed lending, which appears to have helped it weather the crisis.

Now, don’t get me wrong. In the long run, GM will be far better off having gone through its restructuring. But there was a time in 2008 when the folks in DC refused to believe that the auto business’ woes were, in significant part, credit-driven.

But it appears the Fed was well aware of that fact.