Henry Paulson, Secretary of the United States Treasury, said that automakers will soon receive their emergency loans, but the Treasury Department is still talking to automakers and banks before it officially loans out money to General Motors and Chrysler LLC. The loans could come as early as Friday, reports out of Washington, D.C., indicate.
“The automakers will get the money as quickly as we can prudently do it,” Paulson said during an interview on CNBC. “We need to do this, but we need to do it right.”
President George W. Bush echoed Paulson.
“We’ll try to get this done in an expeditious way,” Bush said. He told CNN that the country is in the midst of “a huge recession,” but that he doesn’t want to further worsen the economy by letting the automakers collapse.
“On the other hand, I’m mindful of not putting good money after bad,” Bush said during the interview. “So we’re working through options.”
The Treasury is in the middle of deciding how much of the $15 billion leftover from the TARP funds given to Wall Street that it would allocate to the automakers.
The Treasury is concerned that it will have enough money left to inject into banks between now and the close of the Bush administration in January.
