Former Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA), recently convicted on 11 counts of bribery and racketeering, has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

In his preliminary filing, William and Andrea Jefferson state liabilities in the range of $1 million to $10 million, against declared assets in the same broad range. Most of the debt would appear to be consumer-type debt: credit cards and car loans. Several New Orleans area banks are listed among the creditors. Another noteworthy creditor is the Congressional Federal Credit Union.

Absent from the creditors’ list are the IRS and the State of Louisiana.

A more detailed filing will be required in a few days. Jefferson will be represented in the matter by his daughter, Jalila Jefferson-Bullock.

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How much would you pay for “New GM”?

About a year ago, all of GM’s common stock put together was worth maybe $2 billion, give or take, depending on the day. Go back three years, when things were merely bad instead of catastrophic for them, and people laughed at me whenever I said that GM was going to die. Back then, the stock was worth about $20 billion. For contrast, Toyota Motor at that time was worth more than $200 billion. That’s not a typo.

What would it have taken to buy GM out of bankruptcy, right now? Three years ago, when I first floated the idea to private-equity guys of my acquaintance, the answer would have been in the range of $75 billion. A few months ago, you could have done it for considerably less, depending on how far you could cram down the debt.

But now, We The Taxpayers have gotten suckered into buying the thing as a turnaround play. Barack Obama solved the debt problem by simply killing the bondholders, so he could have gotten the company for next to nothing, as opposed to the 20 to 40 billion dollars it might have cost a private syndicate. (That’s not to say, of course, that you’d ever find private investors stupid enough to do that.)

Instead, we’ve now put $50 billion in cold hard cash into this pig, with a lot more to come. And that’s to buy an asset the market has recently valued at a tiny fraction of that.

So when Obama says he’s going to sell GM back out to the public “very shortly,” what will the price be? Just to break even on his (actually, YOUR and MY) investment in 60% of the company, it’ll have to be almost $100 billion, and that’s ignoring the time value and opportunity cost. To get any kind of a decent return, it’ll have to be way more than $100 billion.

But who would pay even a little fraction of that much for “New GM,” even cleansed of its pension liabilities and long-term debt? New GM, in all candor, is an electric-car startup. I’d pay no more for New GM than I’d pay for Tesla. (And Tesla, according to the speculation which surrounded a capitalization they recently closed, is worth an absolute upper bound of $10 billion, and probably far, far less.)

Barack Obama is in the process of pulling off the biggest ream-job in financial history. Even worse than Bernie Madoff.

General Motors filed for bankruptcy protection this morning and President Obama plans to give the bankrupt car maker another $30 billion bailout during and after the bankruptcy process. That will bring the bailout of General Motors to $50 billion.

The $50 billion bailout of General Motors is second only to the $150 billion AIG bailout.

According to the Washington Post, under the proposed restructuring of General Motors, about 60 percent will be owned by the United States, about 12 percent by the governments of Canada and Ontario, a union health trust would own 17.5 percent, and the company’s current bondholders would get 10 percent.

The General Motors bankruptcy filing is long over due and should have occurred long ago and without the $50 billion bailout.

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Your laugh line of the day: “The party has grown by becoming the party of inclusion.”

…which is the worried reaction from a Lefty blogger who can’t quite understand why Barney Frank, head of the House Financial Services Committee, would say anything like the below in response to the way that the bankruptcy bill got shot down in the Senate (if only temporarily):

The reason that he said something like that, of course, is because the Democratic party is not the ‘party of inclusion:’ it’s the ‘party of expedience.’ The leadership (which is somewhat more liberal than its current Congressional roster, and very much more so than the rank and file) have been throwing this inclusion line around, with admittedly some success: but they have no intention of actually living up to it.

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This is a very quick initial response to the extraordinary announcement of the Chrysler LLC bankruptcy filing. We don’t have all the answers, but that’s partly because we don’t even have all the questions. Something very new and different is happening here.

It’s very far from clear to me that this is a Chapter 11 bankruptcy in any normal sense. For one thing, why is it being announced by the President of the United States rather than by Bob Nardelli?

In reading the news reports, there’s a tremendous number of moving parts here, and no one is being very clear about it. I have at least two very big questions, one of which is public and the other isn’t.

The public question relates to Fiat. Marchionne has been very emphatic that he will put no cash into Chrysler in return for Fiat’s stake, which starts at 20% and could go as high as 51% by 2016. Fiat is giving nothing but access to small-car technology. That can only mean that the government intends to dictate Chrysler’s production mix. That in turn means that the government has chosen to enter the auto business in a forthright and unprecedented way.

The private question relates to the current owner of Chrysler, which is Cerberus Capital Management, one of the most powerful, most wealthy, and most feared private equity groups in the world. They easily have access to billions of dollars they could invest in Chrysler. The fact that they simply don’t want to, tells you that this company isn’t worth investing in, and ipso facto the taxpayers are flushing money down the toilet.

But I want to know much more than that. I want to know exactly what consideration will be paid to Cerberus in return for the common stock that will be ceded to Fiat, to the government, and to the UAW. Are we bailing out a bunch of politically-connected billionaires?

And you can’t say you haven’t noticed how effectively they’ve kept their name out of the news. Whenever you get a chance, ask anyone who will listen: WHY HAS OBAMA NOT TOLD US WHAT HE INTENDS TO GIVE CERBERUS IN RETURN FOR CHRYSLER?

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The big headline yesterday was that GM CEO Rick Wagoner is being dismissed in favor of Fritz Henderson. This isn’t remarkable in itself, because no one expected him to last, despite having the oft-expressed (in public, anyway) full confidence of GM’s board .

Today, the President of the United States is expected to make significant announcements about GM’s warranty policy. No, that’s not a typo, and yes, it’s remarkable. I didn’t say the President of General Motors, I said of the United States.

Since when does an urban agitator and small-time legislator with a law degree think he can run an enterprise with 100,000 employees, thousands of vendors, millions of customers, and operations in every part of the world? Well, that’s one of those questions you’ll just have to ask the people who voted for him last November. I can shed some light on the rest of this.

And there’s another really remarkable aspect here, which speaks either to tremendous political skill or luck among the Democrats: they kept the whole thing out of the news for the last three months.

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Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) knows more than a little about sound fiscal policy. He was elected in 2005 to chair the Senate Budget Committee, and he has been a proponent of spending restraint and lower taxes. No small wonder that he chose not to accept the cabinet post of Commerce Secretary recently offered to him by President Obama, whose thinking on fiscal matters is the antithesis of Gregg’s.

Appearing Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” program with John King, Gregg said that the Obama Administration’s massive budget proposal will bankrupt the country:

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By any reasonable measure, GM, or at least its North American operation, is mortally wounded. The auto industry in the US is a mature one with very little room left to grow. The industry in general, and GM in particular, is saddled with excess and inefficient manufacturing capacity, extortionate union contracts which, for reasons known only to them, management agreed to, and enormous pension and health care liabilities to a pool of retirees which now outnumbers current employees.

At this juncture we’ve “loaned” GM $13.4 billion and GM’s CEO Rick Wagoner is asking for $16.6 billion more if it is to survive. Let’s not kid ourselves. Unlike the Chrysler bailout (for a much better analysis of what the 1979 bailout did and didn’t do, you should read James Hickel’s The Chrysler Bailout Bust), we’re not getting this money back and if $13.4 billion didn’t stop the hemorrhaging, then another $16.6 billion is just a larger band aid.

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