Mitt's showing his true political self today. He talked up about how he'd dump the government's shares of GM immediately, saying that Obama has held back due to the embarrassment of big losses.
First, as head of Bain, Mitt would have never capitalized his own losses without somehow benefiting. He would have waited for the opportune moment to offset profit gains from a sale of a company.
Second, it's easy for someone to capitalize losses at someone else's expense -- that way you can blame other people as much as you want, for the realized losses. You see it happen every time a new CEO takes over a company. The perfect example is HP. Mark Hurd came in and bought Palm. Leo Apotheker came in, dumped Palm's WebOS products and was in the process of transforming HP from a hardware company to a software company by buying up software company Autonomy. Meg Whitman followed up by dumping Autonomy's leadership, keeping the hardware business, but laying off 8% of its workforce. Like I said, it's easy to capitalize someone else's losses.
Third, it's getting to be nearly impossible to track the number of times Mitt has flip flopped on how he would have handled GM and Chrysler. A long time ago (2008) Mitt insisted that Obama should not bail out GM and Chrysler. Earlier this year, he congratulated Obama for following his lead on how to manage a GM and Chrysler bankruptcy. Now he's flipped over and decided that the bailout was bad, and that the government should capitalize its losses at the taxpayer's expense.
Fascinating, don't you think?
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