GM repays loan to US… actually, not really (Update)

It was with great fanfare yesterday that General Motors announced that it was repaying some $4.7 billion of $6.7 billion in loans it received from the federal government. And, with even bigger fanfare, it was announced that this partial repayment was being made some five years earlier than expected.

Too good to be true? Well, it is.

What you weren’t told was that GM was able to repay the money by drawing down on a line of credit that it had from TARP! In other words, GM took funds still available to it through TARP and used those funds to repay the loan it received from the government. Of course, it now owes $4.7 billion on its line of credit with TARP, but, that doesn’t make for good news, so it wasn’t reported.

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