President Obama Announces Good News at Chrysler Plant

U.S. President Barack Obama told a cheering crowd of Chrysler autoworkers that the economy was on the mend in a speech in Toledo, Ohio Friday. What a difference two years can make. In 2009, GM and Chrysler were on the verge of bankruptcy and were rumored to possibly go out of business. The President stepped in and offered assistance in the form of loans to the companies (the third U.S. automaker, Ford, did not require assistance). The White House noted that, in the year before GM and Chrysler filed for bankruptcy, the auto industry shed over 400,000 jobs. Had President Obama failed to intervene, conservative estimates suggest that it would have cost at least an additional one million jobs and devastated the already teetering economy. Since GM and Chrysler Group emerged from bankruptcy in June 2009, the auto industry has added 115,000 jobs – the fastest pace of job growth in the auto industry since 1998. They also announced investments totaling over $8 billion in their U.S. facilities, creating or saving another 20,000 jobs. An added bonus? In the first quarter of 2011, the auto industry reached an important milestone when all three Detroit automakers posted positive quarterly net profits – the first time that has happened since 2004. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was certain the government did the right thing by intervening on behalf of the automakers. “What happens next for Chrysler and GM is up to their executives, managers and workers — just as with any other company. We cannot guarantee their success, and at some point they may stumble. But we've given them a better shot. The choice to stop the American automobile industry from unraveling was the right one,” Geithner said. Chrysler has already taken additional steps toward being a world-class organization again. President Obama announced today that “Chrysler has repaid every dime and then some of what it owed the US taxpayers.” On top of that, Obama announced some more good news for the taxpayers of America. “Last night, we reached an agreement to sell the government's remaining interest in the company,” he said.