Treasury Officials: Never Saw a Loan Like Solyndra

WASHINGTON — Two senior Treasury officials said Friday that they had never seen a loan restructuring similar to the Energy Department loan to a failed solar panel maker.

The half-billion dollar loan to Solyndra Inc. was restructured so that private investors moved ahead of taxpayers for repayment on part of the loan in case of a default. Asked by Republican members of Congress if they had seen that occur in a federal loan, Treasury officials Gary Grippo and Gary Burner said no. Grippo is a deputy assistant treasury secretary and Burner is chief financial officer at the Federal Financing Bank, which made a $528 million loan to Solyndra in 2009.

The two men stopped short of declaring the loan restructuring illegal, as Republican allege. "'I'm unaware of — I can't give you a legal interpretation on that, sir," Burner told Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla.

Grippo, who oversees the financing bank, said it was not Treasury's job to make legal interpretations. Instead, he said Treasury officials were correct to raise questions about the deal, which they did in a series of emails and memos earlier this year.

"Our role is to be as helpful as we can," Grippo said. The testimony by the Treasury officials came after a hearing on the Solyndra loan erupted in a partisan skirmish. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., called the hearing "a rigged proceeding" and a "kangaroo court."

http://www.newsmax.com/InsideCover/Sola ... ode=D441-1

Yep, it was really a loan to bail out the investors. When they bailed out Chrysler and GM, original shareholders were given nothing. Sounds like something funny going on.

Don’t Be Fooled By the Solyndra Bankruptcy Circus — Solar Is Booming

After a few dozen Solyndra hearings like the one in the House today, nobody’s going to remember the Bush administration was just as hellbent to make this loan. Nobody’s going to care that all successful loan programs have failures, that the Solyndra venture was barely 1% of the Energy Department’s $40 billion clean-energy portfolio, that there will still be over $2 billion in reserves for busted loans no matter how Solyndra shakes out. That’s politics.

It never ceases to amaze me how Washington wise men seem to think of renewable energy as some kind of gee-whiz Jetsons technology. I was on some TV show with Sam Donaldson after Fukushima, and he scoffed that maybe we’d have wind and solar someday, but not in his lifetime. Dude! It’s here! Wind is now a bigger employer than coal. Solar is finally scaling up, which is why its costs are falling down. The notion that you have to plunk down $50,000 for a solar system is totally 2008. In much of the country, companies like Solar City and SunRun now finance deals where you plunk down zero dollars to get a panel on your roof, then pay for it with a fixed monthly fee that’s less than what you save on your electric bill.

The collapse of Solyndra is an embarrassing bump on the road to a clean-energy future. Maybe it’s a coincidence that the politicians who are hyping Solyndra tend to be the politicians who want to close that road.

http://swampland.time.com/2011/09/14/do ... z1arjYpypv

After your false apology to Japan thread, the threads you start are questionable at best...

What amazes me is the right puts all the blame on Obama and none on the greedy corporate company execs who knew this was coming and took the money anyway. I'm sure some of them will be charged. I guess it's okay to screw your workers and your stockholders as long as the Obama administration gets all the blame.

"I'm perplexed how they can be in my office in July telling me things are looking better and two months later filing for bankruptcy," Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.), the top Democrat on the committee's oversight panel, said, according to The Hill.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/exa ... 11448.html

Solar is booming because the Federal and State governments are purchasing it. Additionally, state and federal governments are mandating electric companies to purchase it. Yep, it's growing because YOU are paying for via taxes and electric bills.

NOTE: Real Estate boomed too because the Federal government was buying any paper (loans) from banks via Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as demanded by the Democrats and Community Reinvestment Act.

ENTERPRISE FAILURE

[youtube:tb7hckgh][/youtube:tb7hckgh]

Conservation Voice wrote: What amazes me is the right puts all the blame on Obama and none on the greedy corporate company execs who knew this was coming and took the money anyway. I'm sure some of them will be charged. I guess it's okay to screw your workers and your stockholders as long as the Obama administration gets all the blame.

It's Obama's baby. His unchecked spending spree and unregulated bailout allowed this to happen. When people are given money with no accountability what do expect them to do?

"In reality, on January 9, 2009 -- at the end of the Bush administration -- the DOE Credit Committee voted against offering a conditional commitment to Solyndra, saying that the deal was premature and questioning its underlying financial support," Stearns said in his opening statement. "Only after Obama took control, and the stimulus passed, was the Solyndra deal pushed through."

Yeah, it's all Bush's fault.

Soulshiner wrote: After your false apology to Japan thread, the threads you start are questionable at best...

The story about the Solyndra loan conditions being restructured by the Obama administration to put the taxpayers behind the private investors has already been posted here.

But here it is from another source as well...

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2011/10/obama-adminstration-and-gop-battle-over-solyndra-loan-restructuring/1

Obama administration officials and Republicans stepped up the battle today over whether the Department of Energy broke federal law when it restructured a half-billion-dollar loan guarantee for the now-bankrupt solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra.

Recently released e-mails show that Treasury Department officials were concerned about the restructuring of the loan guarantee to the California clean-energy company, because it put private investors ahead of taxpayers for repayment on part of the loan if Solyndra defaulted.

Republicans have pointed to one e-mail from Mary Miller, an assistant Treasury secretary, who wrote in an Aug. 17 e-mail that Treasury's "legal counsel believes that the statute and the DoE regulations both require that the guaranteed loan should not be subordinate to any loan or other debt obligation." Miller also suggested that the Energy Department consult the Justice Department.

What amazes me is the right puts all the blame on Obama and none on the greedy corporate company execs who knew this was coming and took the money anyway. I'm sure some of them will be charged. I guess it's okay to screw your workers and your stockholders as long as the Obama administration gets all the blame.

Well, this is opinion now, but my opinion is that the Solyndra execs really believed that the company would succeed back when they took the government loan money. Solyndra wasn't a complete fraud in that they did produce an innovative product and sold a fair amount of it. And how can you blame Solyendra execs for the Obama administration agreeing to later restructure the terms of the loan putting taxpayers at the bottom? As a result, Solyndra's "stockholders" (not that they were public) apparently didn't get screwed, just the taxpayers did.

Now, when things clearly started to go bad for the company did the execs fess up to it? I doesn't appear they did. Did they get additional government funding later on? Not sure.

Conservation Voice wrote: Don’t Be Fooled By the Solyndra Bankruptcy Circus — Solar Is Booming

After a few dozen Solyndra hearings like the one in the House today, nobody’s going to remember the Bush administration was just as hellbent to make this loan. Nobody’s going to care that all successful loan programs have failures, that the Solyndra venture was barely 1% of the Energy Department’s $40 billion clean-energy portfolio, that there will still be over $2 billion in reserves for busted loans no matter how Solyndra shakes out. That’s politics.

It never ceases to amaze me how Washington wise men seem to think of renewable energy as some kind of gee-whiz Jetsons technology. I was on some TV show with Sam Donaldson after Fukushima, and he scoffed that maybe we’d have wind and solar someday, but not in his lifetime. Dude! It’s here! Wind is now a bigger employer than coal. Solar is finally scaling up, which is why its costs are falling down. The notion that you have to plunk down $50,000 for a solar system is totally 2008. In much of the country, companies like Solar City and SunRun now finance deals where you plunk down zero dollars to get a panel on your roof, then pay for it with a fixed monthly fee that’s less than what you save on your electric bill.

The collapse of Solyndra is an embarrassing bump on the road to a clean-energy future. Maybe it’s a coincidence that the politicians who are hyping Solyndra tend to be the politicians who want to close that road.

http://swampland.time.com/2011/09/14/do ... z1arjYpypv

Solar power creating American jobs? Last I heard China was making better panels for less cost than subsidized American companies.
At least coal and natural gas keeps jobs in America. In fact, coal is a big exporter to China.