Chrysler’s pay-cap dissent

“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.

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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.