Chrysler’s pay-cap dissent

Why executive pay limits might have pushed Chrysler Financial to turn down a cheap loan

“You might have heard that Detroit’s automakers have been struggling recently,” said Mike Lillis in The Washington Independent. Odd, then, that “withering automaker” Chrysler’s finance arm would reject a $750 million cheap federal loan because it might involve curbs on executive pay. According to The Washington Post, Chrysler Financial opted for more costly private loans after some top executives balked at accepting “Washington’s pay limits.”

Of course “the liberals are going to use the executive pay angle to spin this,” said Rob Port in the blog Say Anything. But the lesson here isn’t that the Chrysler executives were “greedy” for rejecting the “big, fat government handout.” They just learned from General Motors the steep price for a bailout: tTe Obama team starts “running your business.”

That’s a pretty useless lesson if your business hits bankruptcy court, said Megan McArdle in The Atlantic. This "fairly explosive accusation” of corporate greed warrants “a grain of salt”—it sounds like a “targeted” leak from frustrated Obama negotiators—but if it’s true, don’t rule out “simple stupidity and greed” at yet another U.S. company.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

That doesn’t sound so unlikely, said Ryan Avent in Portfolio, after reading a new New York magazine story on the “lamentations” of New York’s overpaid, entitled, and out-of-touch banking class. It's a “monument to chutzpah.” If executives like these feel burned, let's hope they keep it to themselves—“all-out class warfare” wouldn’t help anyone.

To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us