Saturday, December 04, 2010

Profiteering: UAW Learns from Goldman Sachs

Steve updated his profiteering-from-Gummint-Motors post.

That means I grossly understated the profit the UAW is going to make from driving GM into bankruptcy. If GM survives as an entity until the middle of 2017, makes its note payments to the UAW, and buys back the preferred stock as soon as it can, the UAW will receive $29.79 billion (or if you will, almost $1.45 for every $1.00 Old GM owed it) before it sells any additional common stock.

Of course. Because "additional common stock" sales may be....ahhh......challenging.

During the Presidential campaign, I mentioned that if Obama were elected--especially if he managed to slam single-payer through--that there would only be two 'safe harbors' remaining for working people in this country: Gummint or unionized shops.

Single-payer is within 5 years of arriving.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The further update from this morning (done when I realized that GM paid off the VEBA note) is that the "all-but-guaranteed" return for the UAW, even if they don't sell another share of common stock, is "only" $28.39 billion (on $20.57 billion of claims against Old GM), but with three important caveats:

- That "all-but-guaranteed" $28.39 billion is now scheduled to be fully-paid-out by the end of 2014, instead of the middle of 2017.
- The UAW has already recovered $19.4 billion of that $20.57 billion.
- On December 15, 2011 (or earlier, if the UAW decides to grab all the cash it can get by either allowing GM to buy back the preferred shares early or selling some of its remaining holdings in Government Motors), the UAW will do what almost no creditor, especially one holding just unsecured debt who was primarily responsible for driving the old company into bankruptcy - get more out of the successor company than what it was owed by the predecessor company.

Somewhere in my stack of stuff, I have a story from earlier this year (I believe from The Wall Street Journal) about how the larger UAW VEBA, including the Ford money and the limited amount it cash it got out of Chrysler thus far, had $45 billion with which to play in the market.

Jim said...

"Single-payer is within 5 years of arriving. "

One can only hope!