WASHINGTON, March 11 (UPI) -- The Congressional Oversight Panel for the $700 billion financial firm bailout bill questioned the tact the government took rescuing U.S. auto lender GMAC.
The panel Congress set up to monitor the Troubled Asset Relieve Program said GMAC, which was loaned $17.5 billion by the Treasury Department, "apparently posed no systemic risk to the financial system" and "did not seem too big to fail, too interconnected to fail," The New York Times reported Thursday.
The panel, in a report scheduled for release Thursday, said the government "might have" chosen the option of a surgical bankruptcy that would have resulted in GMAC selling its mortgage lending operations, while allowing its automobile lending to continue.
Contrary to its treatment of General Motors Co. and Chrysler Group, which went into bankruptcy last summer, the Treasury has not pushed GMAC to come up with a plan to return to profitability, the Times said.
The Treasury Department, in a response to the report, said bailing out GMAC, which gave the federal government 56.3 percent of the company, was "the least costly and least disruptive of all the options available."
