Deniz Anginer's blog

CNN Anchor Erin Burnett mocked the Occupy Wall Street protest during her show recently. Burnett asked a protester if he knew taxpayers “actually made money” on the Wall Street bailout. The protester responded that he was “unaware.”

“Yes, the bank bailout made money for the taxpayers, right now to the tune of $10 billion,” Burnett said. “These are seriously the numbers. This is the big issue? So…we solved it.”

As that exchange demonstrates, the bailout was a success or a failure depending on how you look at it. If you look at direct cash expenditures and receipts, the government has broken even or perhaps made a profit. But that doesn’t seem correct to many. Intuitively, many people from across the political spectrum have a strong suspicion that there are other costs that are not being captured by direct dollar figures.

Did the bailout of Chrysler by the U.S. government overturn bankruptcy law in the United States?

Almost two years ago, the outgoing Bush and incoming Obama administrations announced a series of steps to assist Chrysler, the struggling automaker, in an extraordinary intervention into private industry. The federal government intervened in Chrysler’s reorganization in a manner that, according to many analysts, subordinated the senior secured claims of Chrysler’s lenders to the unsecured claims of the auto union UAW. As one participant interpreted the intervention, the assets of retired Indiana policemen (which were invested in Chrysler’s secured debt) were given to retired Michigan autoworkers.

Critics claim that the bailout turned bankruptcy law upside down, and predicted that businesses would suffer an increase in their cost of debt as a result of the risk that organized labor might leap-frog them in bankruptcy. A long-standing principal of bankruptcy law requires that a debtor’s secured creditors be repaid, in full, before its unsecured creditors receive anything.