GM bailout cost taxpayers $11.2 billion, report says
A new report says taxpayers lost $11.2 billion on the government's聽bailout聽of General Motors.
The estimate comes from a quarterly report Wednesday to Congress by a government watchdog that oversees the聽bailout, and is up from a previous estimate of $10.5 billion.
The Detroit automaker needed the $49.5 billion聽bailout聽to survive its bankruptcy restructuring in 2009. The company went public again in November 2010, and the government sold its last shares of聽GM聽in December. The report says the Treasury Department wrote off an $826 million administrative claim against General Motors Co. in March, ending its involvement with the company.
In an interview last year, Special Inspector General Christy Romero said there was "no question" the department and the taxpayers would lose money on聽GM. The agency said last year that the government lost $2.9 billion on the聽bailout聽of Chrysler, which cost $12.5 billion.
Treasury Department spokesman Adam Hodge said the agency was not looking to make money.
"The goal of Treasury's investment in聽GM聽was never to make a profit, but to help save the American auto industry, and by any measure that effort was successful," he said.
Only one auto-related company is still partly under government control: auto lender Ally Financial Inc. Ally is the former financing business of聽GM, and earlier this month it went public again with an IPO that raised $2.38 billion. The Treasury Department owns a 17 percent stake in the company.
Auto companies received $79.7 billion in the聽bailout, and the Treasury Department has been repaid $59.1 billion.
The department allocated $474.8 billion to the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, to bail out banks, insurers, auto companies and others during the financial crisis. It says it has recovered $438.4 billion.
