Obama's auto task force leader Steven Rattner calls Romney clueless on so-called bailout

Obama's auto task force leader Steven Rattner calls Romney clueless on so-called bailout
5:06 PM, February 14, 2012
By Todd Spangler
Detroit Free Press Washington Staff


WASHINGTON – The head of President Barack Obama’s auto task force overseeing the rescue of General Motors and Chrysler said Tuesday that if Mitt Romney seriously believes the companies would have survived without government financing in 2008 and 2009, he doesn’t have an adequate understanding of how bad the financial crash – and the tightening of credit markets – was at the time.

Steven Rattner, a Democratic supporter who ran a private investment firm before coming to Washington to help rescue GM and Chrysler, told the Free Press in an interview Tuesday that Romney’s position on the so-called bailout is “ridiculous … a complete denial of the facts.”

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“These companies would have closed their doors and liquidated” without government financing, Rattner said Tuesday. He explained that – at the height of the financial collapse – there simply wasn’t private financing available to prop up the companies and provide interim cash to keep them open, meaning they would have shut down and been sold in pieces in a regular bankruptcy procedure. “We took every phone call, we made as many outgoing calls as we could think of.”

Romney, Rattner said, may have made his living as a venture capitalist and attended Harvard Business School, but his theories on saving the auto companies make no sense and “would get somebody a C-grade at best at the Harvard Business School.”

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