Comment & Debate
Steven Pearlstein. “The Road to a Bailout They Don’t Deserve”. The Washington Post. 3 Sept 2008 – Not only are the Big Three not deserving, but to help them out of their current predicament would also set a lousy precedent in a market-driven economy where the possibility of earning great wealth is supposed to be balanced against the possibility of failure. For the government to step in and put up $50 billion in loans to try to save the Big Three auto companies, after having done little or nothing to save the jobs of steelworkers and shoemakers and furniture craftsmen, would be patently unfair.
And yet it is probably the wise thing to do.
This is a uniquely inopportune time for these three giant companies, with their hundreds of thousands of employees and vast national network of suppliers and distributors, to be forced to go through the painful process of bankruptcy reorganization. The national economy is already looking at years of recession and stagnation due to the worst housing and financial crisis since the 1930s, while the economy in much of the industrialized Midwest is already in its own depression.