Briefing: Did Obama auto policy cause thousands of job losses?

The government watchdog overseeing the Treasury's financial stability fund says in a new report that the Obama administration needlessly and carelessly forced General Motors and Chrysler to close more than 2,000 dealerships, costing perhaps of tens of thousands of jobs, as a condition of government aid. The critical report from the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Assets Relief Program says:

In the face of the worst unemployment crisis in a generation and during the same period in which the Government was spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a stimulus package to spur job growth, ... these decisions -- all based on the Auto Team's theory that GM and Chrysler would be better off by accelerating dealer terminations -- contributed to the accelerated loss of potentially tens of thousands of jobs. ... [I]t is not at all clear that the greatly accelerated pace of the dealership closings during one of the most severe economic downturns in our Nation's history was either necessary for the sake of the companies' economic survival or prudent for the sake of the Nation's economic recovery.

Herb Allison, the assistant Treasury secretary for financial stability, sharply disagreed with the report in a letter to the SIGTARP. "In the absence of government assistance, both GM and Chrysler faced almost certain failure and liquidation, which would have resulted in the loss of hundreds of thousands of American jobs across multiple industries," he wrote.

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