Steven Rattner remains convinced that handing future generations trillions of dollars of government bonds imposes a burden on them and is very unhappy that I don’t see things that way. Let’s try this one more time.

KORUS as a whole will contribute to the increasing financialization of our economy at the expense of our manufacturing base. Yet oddly, by leveraging payback for its various bailouts differently, the Administration has elicited cries of support from both the finance and the manufacturing industry.

Or maybe it’s just that unlike the UAW, the banksters have found a way to roll Obama over and over.

I don’t disagree with Adam Levitin at all about the foreclosure crisis and the deliberate backing away from any accountability for the banks. Clearly this accountability crisis is at the forefront of not only our financial meltdown and our economic malaise, but a host of other matters including civil liberties in particular.

However, without concluding that a corner has been turned or that a new era has come to Washington, let me relate a few disparate items here for you.

This IPO is no great reflection, one way or another, on the success of the bailout.

Indeed, it may be something far worse. . . .

In Steven Rattner’s book, he describes newly elected Barack Obama asking his advisors “Why can’t [the US automakers] make a Corolla?” Implicitly, of course, he was asking “why can’t they make a Corolla in the United States.” His economic advisors, according to Rattner, admitted they didn’t know: “We wish we knew.” The correct answer to [...]

I’m going to have a few follow-up posts about Steven Rattner’s Overhaul generally and Saturday’s book salon on it. But for the moment, I wanted to add something to two excellent reviews of it by Malcom Gladwell and Felix Salmon. Together, they both distinguish between the product GM makes and the debt it had.

I wanted to return to a detail I mentioned in yesterday’s book salon. As I noted, in his book on the auto bailout, Steven Rattner described Citi as being worried during the Chrysler negotiations that retail customers would retaliate if Citi played hard ball.

I come to Steven Rattner’s Overhaul: An Insider’s Account of the Obama Administration’s Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry from a very particular perspective. As a Michigander whose husband still works in the auto industry and whose town has benefited from battery subsidies, I’m a grateful direct beneficiary of the work the Obama Administration did to save the auto industry. But that also means I read this book, which might have been subtitled, “Wall Street gapes at Detroit” from the perspective, “Detroit gapes back at Wall Street.”

Somebody in the White House wouldn’t let Steven Rattner’s claim that Rahm Emanuel had attacked the UAW go unanswered.

In honor of Steve Rattner’s revelation that Rahm Emanuel wandered around during the auto bailout saying “fuck the UAW,” I’ve renamed the “Cadillac tax” the “Fuck the UAW” tax.