To get any kind of positive return on the money it loaned, the Obama administration is hoping GM shares will rise in value when the company emerges from its Chapter 11 proceeding.
But there's also the added complication of pensions.
GM has made pension promises totaling about $100 billion in current dollars. Thanks to the financial crisis, investments in the company's pension funds are worth about $20 billion less than the obligations.
There’s an interesting development that almost got lost yesterday in the escalating partisan warfare over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s claims that the CIA misled her about interrogation tactics. Sen. Arlen Specter may be getting some traction with his idea on how to avoid future misunderstandings between Congress and the executive branch: Start keeping transcripts of the intelligence briefings for top lawmakers.
Specter, D-Pa. (we’re still getting used to that too), wrote a letter yesterday outlining his suggestion to CIA director Leon E. Panetta, White House counsel Gregory Craig, and the top Democrats and Republicans on the House and Senate intelligence committees. His idea: To avoid any future misunderstandings about what was said in the intelligence briefings, keep transcripts of every briefing given to the Gang of Eight — the four top intelligence committee members and the four highest-ranking House and Senate leaders.
In an interview on MSNBC yesterday, Senate Intelligence Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein of California said Specter might be on to something. She said she’ll discuss the proposal with other committee members and suggested it could become a provision of the annual intelligence authorization bill the committee will start writing soon.
All the talk resonating through the Congress and the White House about energy efficiency, clean energy investments and green jobs begs the following question: Exactly where is the money going to come from?
Probably not via the cap-and-trade plans circulating in the House and Senate, which focus on curbing carbon emissions and forcing utilities to draw on more existing renewable energy sources. And likely not from the credit markets, which are only functioning these days thanks to massive intervention by the Federal Reserve.
For all their social utility, next-generation energy projects are a somewhat risky investment because of fluctuating fossil fuel prices, an incomplete national transmission grid and the lack of a proven track record for the technologies involved. The government can offer loan guarantees and tax credits to reduce some of the risk, but those incentives are always subject to the whims of Congress.
Which is why there is an intensifying push to create a so-called Green Bank, which would provide a dedicated source of funds for renewable and energy efficient initiatives.
President Obama has asked Congress to send him a credit card regulation bill by Memorial Day. That day is fast approaching. But the bill has been complicated in the Senate with the addition of a gun amendment that liberal Democrats hate, and there’s probably no way to avoid the issue in the House.
It’s an acknowledgement that the pro-gun rights majority is now strong enough in both the House and the Senate that neither Obama nor the Democratic leadership are willing to pick fights with them — or put their own priorities in jeopardy.
The issue of what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi knew about waterboarding has always been a bit of a sideshow - an interesting subplot in a larger story that’s really about the people who made it happen. But it does touch on an important question of congressional oversight: What, if anything, can members of Congress do to protest something they can’t talk about openly?
By suggesting today that there wasn’t really anything she could do about the waterboarding once she knew about it — other than try to get the Democrats back in power — Pelosi opened the door to helpful suggestions from Republicans about other kinds of protests she could have tried.
At her weekly press conference, Pelosi said one of her aides told her in 2003 that other lawmakers had been briefed about the use of waterboarding, and that it was “appropriate” to let Rep. Jane Harman of California, then the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence committee, write a letter of protest to the CIA general counsel.
If White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's correct and you need a crisis to get things done, Friday's employment report showing companies cut fewer jobs in April might be a sign the Obama administration's window for big policy initiatives could be closing just a bit.
The Labor Department said the jobless rate rose to 8.9 percent as payrolls were trimmed by another 539,000 positions. That's bad, but not quite as bad as the 699,000 jobs lost in March.
President Obama used the occasion to launch a new plan to allow jobless individuals to return to college without losing their eligibility for unemployment insurance. Under the initiative, the Labor Department will urge states to update rules that generally require the unemployed to be looking for work as a precondition for collecting aid.
As the Federal Reserve prepares to announce the results of "stress tests" it ran on the nation's 19 largest banks, White House officials are tamping down speculation they will need to go to Congress for another infusion of taxpayer money to keep the most troubled institutions afloat.
After all, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner already is busy recruiting private investors to vacuum up those bad mortgages and other assets that are weighing down bank balance sheets.
And the president, at his news conference last Wednesday, made it clear that he doesn't want to stay in the business of running banks and car companies at a time when he's got to manage two wars and wrestle with an economic crisis.