In 1980, aided by $1.5 billion in loan guarantees from the U.S. government and his own pitchman routines on television, Lee Iacocca brought Chrysler back from the abyss.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Chrysler builds great cars.
You look at what happened with Chrysler, it went through that bankruptcy, and it's re-emerged in a much different fashion, privately held in some of those things, and it's really putting out a great product.
I mean, what Fiat had it was not very big, it was something like forty or fifty million dollars, but it's enough to get revolving credit, to get starting away again, the buying of new machinery.
In 1958, my father invested everything he had in a business venture and became the largest automobile dealership in Chicago for Ford's new Edsel line. But Edsel sales plummeted and my father fell into bankruptcy. I watched him struggle; working long hours to protect us from poverty.
I've always found a way to make my way, and now I've had the fortune of being hired by a great company - Chrysler Corporation - one of the original Big Three.
We were the first bank to start a loan modification at IndyMac and had a very good record of working with the regulators.
Neither the George W. Bush nor the Obama administrations volunteered to bail out G.M., Chrysler and other parts of the auto sector. Both subscribed firmly to the longstanding American principle that government should resolutely avoid these kinds of interventions, particularly in the industrial sector.
Disney had made such a great deal of money on Snow White that the banks gave him the go-ahead on the next three films. But he was heavily dependent on the foreign market.
In 1964, when Lee Iacocca said, 'Shelby, I want you to make a sports car out of the Mustang,' the first thing I said was, 'Lee, you can't make a race horse out of a mule. I don't want to do it.' He said, 'I didn't ask you to make it; you work for me.'
Viewed from a distance, or through the eye of the All-Knowing CEO of the Universe, the crash of 2008 followed the usual pattern. A long-lived boom driven by cheap credit, going back as far as 1982 (though subject to interruptions in the mid-1980s and 1990s, and in 2001), came to grief because of a rise in the cost of borrowing money.
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