GM Payback Lies - Like A Crock
The original commercial from is above. GM fails to mention where they acquired the funds to make the shifty payback claim. It's common street fraud.
1) GM was loaned a separate $49.5 billion thru a TARP escrow account.
2) GM used money from the TARP escrow account to pay back the TARP loan.
3) The PR campaign was cover for an additional $10 billion loan from the DOE.
GM still owes taxpayers approximately $50 billion, though you would never know that from the lies they've been telling.
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The truth...
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Text from Reason TV Youtube page -- As with the Pontiac Aztek, an ugly exterior masks an ever darker problem: Whitacre is being fanciful to the point of deceit. GM received $50 billion in TARP funds (never mind that TARP was only supposed to cover financial institutions). About $7 billion of that came in the form of a straight-up, low-interest loan. And about $13 billion came in the form of an escrow account.
So how has GM, which lost $38 billion in 2007 even as it sold 9.4 million cars, paid back its debt? It took money from the escrow account to pay back the $6.7 billion loan. Do you remember when you were a kid and your parents gave you $20 to buy them a Christmas present? You bought them something worth $3 and pocketed the rest? That's what GM has just done. Oh, and do you remember when you hit your parents up for college? GM has applied for a $10 billion, low-interest loan from the government to modernize its plants so its cars will meet new federal mileage standards.
If you think all this constitutes paying back their debt in full and ahead of schedule, you might want to check out the new line of GM cars. And hope that the company's safety engineers are better at math than their CEO.
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Don't skip this one.