The writer here is someone I know, and his info about how the foreign transplants don't want any of the Big 3 to fail was the first I'd heard the comment specifically. I know the states who host transplant operations seem to be forcing a harder line on the bailout, but if their efforts to bolster their home-state industries result in a national dive because of supplier problems, they're shooting themselves in the foot.
To follow my arguments, you’ll need to understand, or at least entertain, the following predicates.
A. There are no good options.
If you keep thinking of this as a question of saving a company or two, or even of saving some jobs, you’re missing the whole point. On their merits, GM and Chrysler might not be worth saving, and Ford is only a step or two behind. They need taxpayer money because they can’t get private capital. Frozen credit plays a part, but the main problem is they’re just a bad investment in their current state and the state of our economy. As for the jobs argument, people will lose jobs, bankruptcy or not. The difference is how many, how quickly, under what circumstances and what the consequences will be. To understand our predicament, you must accept that, economically, we’re fucked. But that doesn’t mean we should throw our hands up and look the other way. We can still influence how fucked we are, and how we are fucked. Take politics for example. If you believe politicians are all crooks, The Detroit Outsider might not argue, but some are still better than others.
B. GM and Chrysler failure is imminent and would devastate the economy
The nightmare scenarios aren’t hyperbole. The supplier base will fall, affecting all auto manufacturing in the States, including foreign transplants. Scores of people will be out of work, possibly sans severance. Money will stop flowing. We lost more than a half million jobs in November, and already people and companies are hoarding cash, concerned that they’ll be next or, as someone recently told me, because it would feel wrong spending money when so many others can’t. You see how this can get out of control? We’ve proven that we can spend our way into trouble, but we can also cause problems through not spending. The D.O. isn’t an economist, but he knows GM’s presence across the country—locally, regionally and nationally—as well as globally. More than anything, I was convinced of the direness of circumstances when people from foreign transplant car companies intimated that they don’t want to see the domestics fail and bring down the supplier base. All it takes is one major part or subsystem to disappear and the lines grind to a halt. Where the transplants have been in this plea is a good question. They officially have no opinion on the matter, and for competitive reasons that makes some sense. Their shareholders probably don't want them standing up for the competition, for example. But it speaks volumes that the companies best positioned to benefit from their competitors’ fall don’t want to see it happen.
http://detroitoutsider.blogspot.com/2008/12/detroit-outsider-didnt-want-to-do-this.html
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