Chrysler’s Two Options: What JP Morgan’s Insistence on Bankruptcy Will Mean

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Yesterday, I pointed to a WSJ report that JP Morgan wants to force Chrysler into bankruptcy rather than make the concessions necessary for a Fiat merger.

There was some uncertainty about what those two different scenarios really mean–and therefore what the impact of JP Morgan’s intransigence might be. So this is an attempt to lay out what those scenarios are. Details on these two scenarios come from the viability plan Chrysler submitted on February 17, though some of its assumptions are optimistic and both the VEBA numbers and the secured debt numbers are out-of-date. 

The bottom line, though, is this: If Chrysler goes into bankruptcy, it will likely mean 210,000 extra lost jobs and the loss of healthcare for up to 700,000 UAW retirees.

Fiat-Chrysler

Before it will provide $6 billion additional funding to support the Fiat-Chrysler merger, the Obama Administration has demanded:

  • Cerberus and Daimler to write off their stake in Chrysler
  • Fiat to take a 20% stake in the company
  • UAW to accept half of the VEBA payment Chrysler owes–$4.4 billion dollars–to come in the form of equity in the new Fiat-Chrysler (along with some additional concessions)
  • Chrysler’s secured creditors (JP Morgan, Citibank, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and others) to accept equity in exchange for over $5 billion in debt
  • Additional $6 billion in government funding

Now, Chrysler doesn’t describe in detail what would happen If the Fiat deal were to go through, so the following is a guesstimate on my part. 

The quickest change would be that Chrysler dealers throughout North America would have Fiats to sell–primarily the small A and B platform cars with which it is competitive in Europe (including its 500, which just won car of the year in Europe).  It would take at least a year and a half to do this, though, and Fiat will face some trouble assembling them cheaply in the US (in Europe 500s are assembled in Poland). Still, if it were able to pull almost inhumanly quick adjustments to the North American market in the next 2.5 years, Fiat (and with it, Chrysler), might be instantly competitive in the A and B segments and with that, dealers might be much more viable. But it remains to be seen whether that would be profitable.

The single biggest problem with the Fiat deal, IMO, is that gas prices are going to be volatile for the foreseeable future, which means being competitive in the A and B segments could either be a godsend (if gas goes up to $5/gallon again) or a blip on the radar (if gas remains cheap).

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Holder Wants to Stop Playing Mukasey’s Whack-a-Mole with Financial Fraud

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Last June, at a time when it was clear the shitpile was a big fraud but before the perpetrators had destroyed the evidence, Michael Mukasey decided he’d rather play whack-a-mole with financial crime than pursuing it at a national level.

For some reason, Michael Mukasey doesn’t want to investigate and prosecute mortgage fraud using a comprehensive, centralized approach.

Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey rejected on Thursday the idea of creating a national task force to combat the country’s mortgage fraud crisis, calling the problem a localized one akin to “white-collar street crimes.”

Mr. Mukasey made clear that he saw the mortgage fraud problem at the root of the nation’s housing crisis as a serious one. But he said he was confident that the Justice Department’s current approach — using local prosecutors’ offices around the country to oversee separate F.B.I. investigations — was adequate.

Eric Holder doesn’t think that was such a good idea (via TPMM). 

Mr. Holder said the Justice Department is planning a new initiative to bring together federal and state prosecutors in combating financial fraud and white-collar crime.

"We will be working with them to come up with a way to deal with these fraud problems and white-collar problems. The federal government can’t do this alone," Mr. Holder said.

[snip]

One change is likely to involve a task force on financial crime, akin to one that was organized during the Bush administration following the collapse of Enron Corp.

Mr. Holder’s predecessor in the Bush administration, Michael Mukasey, was disinclined generally to set up task forces because he thought they could be inefficient. He studied the idea of a national task force to focus on fraud and the mortgage crisis but decided against it because he said the crisis differed in various parts of the country.

Mr. Holder disagreed on the effectiveness of a national strategy and said an official announcement would be coming soon. "Based on my experience, I know that task forces work," he said, adding that state prosecutors have expertise on financial fraud that could benefit the federal government.

Gosh. What a novel idea. Investigating the "too big to fail" criminals at a level that’s almost as big as the crime.

And perhaps someday we’ll learn why Mukasey was so disinclined to focus federal attention on the shitpile just as it was about to collapse.

Bailed Out Bank, JP Morgan, Dooming Chrysler

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the end of Chrysler

photo courtesy of S and C

The WSJ confirms what we’ve all probably suspected: the creditors that are forcing Chrysler into bankruptcy are the same banks that have been surviving only with the help of the federal government. And of course, they are refusing to offer the same generosity to Chrysler.

Banks that loaned Chrysler LLC $6.8 billion are resisting government pressure to swap more than $5 billion of that for stock to slash the car maker’s debt, according to people familiar with the matter, hindering Chrysler’s effort to restructure outside of bankruptcy court.

[snip]

The lenders, which include J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Citigroup Inc. and Morgan Stanley, hold great influence in moving the process along. As holders of secured debt, they have the right to take control of Chrysler plants, brands and other assets, which were pledged as collateral for the loans, if the company files for bankruptcy protection.

As a result, Chrysler may be worth more to the lenders in a bankruptcy liquidation than if they agree to restructure the debt, and the government has less leverage to force the banks to make concessions.

The negotiations show how the government’s involvement in both banks and industrial companies is creating uncomfortable circumstances: The U.S. has given aid to some of the very banks that are demanding tough terms from Chrysler, also a recipient of government loans.

[snip]

The Treasury Department began talking with the banks on Wednesday. The bailout money these banks took from the Troubled Asset Relief Program "hasn’t been mentioned, but everyone is aware that issue is there," said a person familiar with the talks.

[snip]

The J.P. Morgan position, said these people, is that concessions by Chrysler’s creditors should be treated as they would be in a normal bankruptcy — meaning the billions of dollars of government debt and the UAW retiree health-care obligation should be wiped out before the secured lenders lose anything on their $6.8 billion.

JP Morgan has been the recipient of bailout love in many forms: direct receipt of TARP funds, the Fed’s honoring of huge loans JP Morgan made, AIG counter-party funds, and low-risk sweet-heart deals for JP Morgan to "rescue" other banksters–for a total of somewhere between $27 billion and $300 billion. And of course, JP Morgan has already been using its TARP funds for acquisitions, not loans. 

But it is unwilling to take a haircut on loans of $2.5 billion that represent a miniscule percentage of all the welfare it has gotten from the Federal government.

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Patrick Kennedy to Introduce Bill to Repeal Gramm-Leach … Maybe

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One thing that astounds me about this whole financial crisis is that no one–no one–in a position of power has seemingly considered undoing the damage that was done when Gramm-Leach-Bliley started allowed agents to dress up as banksters, banksters to dress up as stock brokers, and stock brokers to dress up as insurance agents. Rather than passing new legislation to set up a super regulator to regulate companies that are too big too fail, wouldn’t it be smarter to go back to the laws that prevented companies from getting too big to fail in the first place? And even if there are good reasons not to go back, don’t you think we ought to at least consider it?

So I was thrilled yesterday when Patrick Kennedy said he was goig to introduce a bill to repeall Gramm-Leach-Bliley.

One thing that I think is maybe one of the many causes of this and that I will hold myself accountable for is voting for the Glass-Steagall reform. And I, for one, am going to introduce legislation to repeal that repeal. Because I don’t believe we ought to be having, as has played itself out, AIG insurance companies doing banking business and banking businesses doing insuring business. And having apples over here and oranges over here and everybody’s getting these financial products all mixed and matched. You’ve got derivatives and debt swaps and what are these things happening, you’ve got people taking loans out and then taking insurance out on the loans because of another part of the company. I mean it just seems we’re rife with conflicts of interest. 

Cool! I thought! We can finally talk about putting oranges and apples back where they belong!

So I called Kennedy’s office to find more details. And it sure sounds like Kennedy is less convinced he’s going to pursue repealing the repeal. Here’s his statement.

"We are in the middle of a crisis that has reached around the globe and hit home in Rhode Island. Now is the time to have an open and honest conversation about every aspect of our nation’s financial system. Through my work on the Oversight committee, I look forward to being part of this conversation and making up for eight years of lost time. While we need to take a good hard look at the legal framework established under the Graham-Leach-Bliley Act, this issue is much bigger than any single law.

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Hank Greenberg Sorta Liveblog

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For reasons I explained here, I’m not going to do a full liveblog of Hank Greenberg’s appearance before Oversight today, though will keep half an eye on it. If you want to follow along, it’s on CSPAN3 and this Committee stream (which I can’t get to work).

Most interesting detail, thus far, is that Issa insisted that Greenberg’s lawyer be sworn in, as well as Greenberg. 

Greenberg’s complaining that by nationalizing AIG, it chased employees away. He’s saying it needs a new management team with experience in insurance (as if Edward Liddy doesn’t have insurance experience), emphasizing that said management team needed an internationalist focus, bc that’s what AIG is involved in. He’s arguing too that the govt should just limit its ownership to 15% so that private investors will get involved. He did say that AIGFP should be walled off–that’s a stance I suspect is smart.

Issa just asked Greenberg about the Ferguson case (involving Gen Re) in Connecticut, suggesting Greenberg was an unindicted co-conspirator. Greenberg’s name is all over that, but his lawyer wants to claim he was never tied to that. Also, apparently Greenberg has received a Wells Notice from the SEC. His lawyer didn’t explain what the Wells Notice pertained to.

Hank says to Kanjorski that he is a big fan of transparency. Issa takes that opportunity to introduce an SEC settlement showing that under Hank AIG was engaged in sham reinsurance schemes (this is the Gen Re thing). 

Lynch: The Maiden Lane CDS "are in the toilet."

Hank: Maiden Lane III terrible deal for the taxpayer. Purchased at par, even though the marks on those CDOs way down. 

Hank trying to assure Lynch that it was just chance that they picked OTS as regulator, rather than someone tougher. 

Patrick Kennedy just said he’s going to submit a bill to repeal the repeal of Glass-Steagall!!!

Hank had several conversations with Baxter NYF President, and two conversations with Geithner.

Car Recovery Czar Ed Montgomery Comes to Michigan

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In a little noticed detail from Monday’s verdict on the auto industry, Obama named Ed Montgomery Director of Recovery for Auto Communities.

Today, the President appointed Ed Montgomery, former Deputy Secretary of the Labor Department and current Dean at the University of Maryland, to become Director of Recovery for Auto Communities and Workers. Dr. Montgomery has more than 25 years experience working on issues related to worker training and local economic development and has worked first hand with State and local government agencies and nonprofits in Michigan and Ohio on strategies to revitalizing areas hit by job loss.

In his new role, Dr. Montgomery will bring all parties – workers, firms, unions, other private sector employers, community-based organizations, state and local governments, and foundations – to the table to maximize communication and cooperation and to develop innovative strategies for relief and recovery. He will ensure that communities and workers can take full advantage of all available resources and to ensure that the funds are distributed quickly, efficiently and equitably He will work with the Administration, relevant Governors and Congressional leaders to launch new executive and legislative initiatives to support these distressed communities and help them retool and revitalize their economies. He will identify and pursue all possible opportunities, including for example,
initiatives to:

  • Maximize the effectiveness of Recovery Act funds for new and more diverse economic development for new jobs, business and industry through various means including local infrastructure, housing, education and new industry.
  • Deploy rapid response unit to communities facing plant closings to both meet immediate needs and to develop strategies for new job growth.
  • Extend Trade-Adjustment-Assistance (TAA) to the auto industry, including retraining, healthcare extensions, income support and wage insurance.
  • Attract major defense, research, green industry and other project to the region. Channel Workforce Investment Act (WIA) and other emergency grant funds to the region.
  • Work with stakeholders to develop new legislative efforts to direct emergency support to affected communities and regions, and bring new jobs and economic opportunities to these areas. 

Today, Montgomery met with Governor Granholm (and, after this presser, with Detroit Mayor Ken Cockrel) to talk about the needs of Michigan’s blighted auto communities.

Montgomery strikes me as a good choice. Unlike Steven Rattner, Montgomery has the background to understand Michigan’s issues (and once taught at MSU), and the bureaucratic chops to actually do some good.

As he explained in the video above, his wife’s family is an auto family. Read more →

Fire Ken Lewis for the $3 Billion in Merrill Lynch Bonuses

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I’ve been meaning to point to Andy Stern’s call to give Ken Lewis, CEO of Bank of America, the same treatment Obama gave Wagoner–the boot.

Both Rick Wagoner and Ken Lewis sunk large public companies — putting thousands out of work and toppling the American economy — while accepting billions in taxpayer bailouts. Yet only Wagoner got a pink slip. It’s time for Treasury Secretary Geithner to replace Ken Lewis as CEO and let real reform take hold at Bank of America.

And Change to Win’s petition calling to fire Lewis. 

But this tidbit–courtesy of Howie–will really make you want to oust Ken Lewis.

In its last days as an independent company, Merrill gave performance-based bonuses exclusively to employees earning $300,000 a year or more and holding a rank of vice president or higher, according to their financial statements. $3.62 billion was handed out to these executives – a sum equal to 36.2 percent of the $10 billion in taxpayer funds that were allocated to Merrill as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) before the bonuses were paid.

The company had been failing as a result of misadventures in the now infamous mortgaged-backed securities market which began crumbling with the decline of home values as the bubble burst.

The performance bonuses were determined by Merrill’s compensation committee on December 8, 2008, before Merrill revealed that it lost $15 billion in the final three months of 2008, unusual timing according to court documents filed by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo in an ongoing suit against Merrill’s former CEO.

In prior years, Merrill paid performance bonuses of this type after the end of the year, in January or February of the next year.

[snip]

The questionable timing and the amounts of these bonuses were not revealed to Bank of America shareholders when they voted to acquire Merrill. These facts raise questions about what government officials knew about the bonuses and when they knew it, according to Kucinich’s letter. 

$3.62 billion would keep all of GM in business for a month or two. Read more →

Pool Boy’s Third Way Propaganda

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David Sirota pointed to this absolutely disgusting quote in a Pool Boy/Mike Allen Politico article suggesting the White House retains confidence in banksters but not in auto execs.

[A Democratic official close to the White House said] "They have more confidence in the leadership on the banking side – that there are people in place who understand what went wrong and the steps necessary to deal with this disaster. They have no sense of confidence that the auto industry has the capacity or plans to structure a workout."

Now, Sirota is right to be appalled. And I have no doubt that many of the bankster enablers close to Obama, and maybe Obama himself, believe this.

But it pays to look at how Pool Boy (aka Jim VandeHei) and Allen make their argument. Here’s their claim:

Critics of President Obama’s do-or-die plan for General Motors and Chrysler are making this a fight over fairness: Why do banks get carrots and the autos get the heavy stick?

It’s a fair question, and one likely to resonate with those who feel Obama has gone light on insurance giant AIG and bailed-out banks like Citigroup. But, based on conversations with White House officials and advisers, the president has a much more jaundiced view of the automakers – and sees limited upside for bailing them out.

How to find a source that says what you want

First, take a look at who the White House officials and advisers behind this story are–and precisely what each one is saying.

Obama:

We’ve reached the end of that road. And we, as a nation, cannot afford to shirk responsibility any longer. Now is the time to confront our problems head-on and do what’s necessary to solve them. 

(The complete context of that quote blame a failure of leadership in Detroit and DC.)

A Democratic official close to the White House:

"The likelihood of failure here is too high to invest any more political or financial capital at the moment," said a Democratic official close to the White House. "For all the negative aspects of structured bankruptcy [a likely outcome for GM], it doesn’t necessarily collapse the domestic auto industry for all of time. It will continue to exist in some form."  

[snip]

"They have more confidence in the leadership on the banking side – that there are people in place who understand what went wrong and the steps necessary to deal with this disaster. They have no sense of confidence that the auto industry has the capacity or plans to structure a workout."

Read more →

PBGC Scam: In the Summer, They Still Believed They Could Win

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I have just one thing to add to the great discussion on the report that the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation’s decision last summer to move the pension fund out of bonds and into stocks.

Just months before the start of last year’s stock market collapse, the federal agency that insures the retirement funds of 44 million Americans departed from its conservative investment strategy and decided to put much of its $64 billion insurance fund into stocks.

Switching from a heavy reliance on bonds, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation decided to pour billions of dollars into speculative investments such as stocks in emerging foreign markets, real estate, and private equity funds.

The agency refused to say how much of the new investment strategy has been implemented or how the fund has fared during the downturn. The agency would only say that its fund was down 6.5 percent – and all of its stock-related investments were down 23 percent – as of last Sept. 30, the end of its fiscal year. But that was before most of the recent stock market decline and just before the investment switch was scheduled to begin in earnest.

First, we know from the fear-mongering about voter fraud and the plans to use foreclosure lists to vote-cage that the Republicans still believed they had a shot of winning New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio, and Michigan. Last summer, at the time this decision was made but before the switch was enacted (according to the vague dates in the story), Republicans still believed they had a shot at winning the Presidency.

Second, we know that the Bush Administration used federal resources for political ends. 

Third, the market was already beginning to tank when they made this decision.  And Karl Rove knows you don’t win elections if the economy isn’t "strong."

Call me crazy. But it sure looks like some Bush flunkie put the potential retirement of a bunch of Americans up in smoke so a guy who married a $100 million sugar momma would have a shot at being President. 

Update: Prof Foland and drational say I’m wrong, and that the scandal is likely cronyism and not electoral politics.

Prof Foland:

Yves Smith has the allocation percentages before and after. To me at least, they don’t seem to suggest that this was done to rescue the US stock market. Actually, the US stock market investment percentage went down as a result of the change, from 25% to Read more →

They’re Not Tax Havens … They’re Secrecy Havens

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Citing a GAO report I linked to in January, Joe Conason had a much noted article on "tax shelters" this week. He argues we should focus on finding all the unpaid taxes in the tax shelters these companies are using, rather than focusing on AIG’s measly bonuses.

In the article, Conason asks "what other reason" businesses would have for using the tax shelters, concluding that it must be the taxes.

According to the Government Accountability Office, nearly all of America’s top 100 corporations maintain subsidiaries in countries identified as tax havens. As the GAO notes, there could be reasons other than avoiding the IRS to set up branches in places such as Singapore, Luxembourg and Switzerland, where taxes are light or nonexistent and keeping clients’ illicit secrets is considered a matter of national pride.

But what reason other than evasion could there be for Goldman Sachs Group to set up three subsidiaries in Bermuda, five in Mauritius, and 15 in the Cayman Islands? Why did Countrywide Financial need two subsidiaries in Guernsey? Why did Wachovia need 18 subsidiaries in Bermuda, three in the British Virgin Islands, and 16 in the Caymans? Why did Lehman Brothers need 31 subsidiaries in the Caymans? What do Bank of America’s 59 subsidiaries in the Caymans actually do? Why does Citigroup need 427 separate subsidiaries in tax havens, including 12 in the Channel Islands, 21 in Jersey, 91 in Luxembourg, 19 in Bermuda and 90 in the Caymans? What exactly is going on at Morgan Stanley’s 19 subs in Jersey, 29 subs in Luxembourg, 14 subs in the Marshall Islands, and its amazing 158 subs in the Caymans? And speaking of AIG, why does it have 18 subs in tax-haven countries? (Don’t expect to find out from Fox News Channel or the New York Post, because News Corp. has its own constellation of strange subsidiaries, including 33 in the Caymans alone.)

I pointed out in my January post the other point of these tax havens:

What Levin didn’t say, of course, is that these tax havens allow them to avoid financial oversight, too.

And wrote another post giving a scary example of what those other reasons might include.

Masaccio pointed me to these two passages in AIG’s 10K, which sound like they may describe what Gober is talking about:

Various AIG profit centers, including DBG, AIU, AIG Reinsurance Advisors, Inc. and AIG Risk Finance, as well as certain Foreign Life subsidiaries, Read more →