Bucyrus CEO Just a Political Neophyte?

Tweet

When the Export-Import Bank, an agency of the federal government with plenty of walking around money, denied a loan guarantee application for up to $600 million to a foreign power plant company - who thought there would be such a ruckus made of the decision? Lets' put it this way, if a privately-owned bank denied those loan guarantees for any reason, free market advocates would say the decision was based on detailed competitive profit/loss analysis and unreasonable risk. But when the government denies the application for any reason, politicians and their media enablers find an opening to grandstand the decision against their opponents as ideological.

Ex-Im Bank Reconsiders Indian Coal project

WSJ Excerpt:
The federal export-credit agency said Wednesday its board will reconsider a decision last week against providing loan guarantees to help finance the purchase of U.S. coal-mining equipment by Reliance Power Ltd of India.

It's important to note that the loan guarantees are to finance Reliant purchases.

Bucyrus International Inc., based in South Milwaukee, won an international competitive-bidding process to supply an estimated $600 million worth of mining equipment for this project. The problem is that Bucyrus and their Indian partner Reliant predicated their sales deal on whether U.S. taxpayers will co-sign the project's loan guarantees.

LaCrosse Tribune Excerpt:
“I don’t understand politics,” Sullivan said. “I’m just a business guy who builds machinery. I don’t care what happens, I don’t care if I’m the bad guy, all I care about is that we don’t lose these jobs.”

Doesn't understand politics? He could have fooled me.

JS Online Excerpt
Sullivan knew which political buttons to push. Yet if Obama had not been coming to Racine, it likely would have been 10 times harder to get his attention.

Anybody who could spin a debt-weary populace and politicians from both parties (among them the supposed free market debt-phobic Paul Ryan) to eagerly demand that the U.S taxpayer co-sign loan guarantees for up to $600 million for a fossil fuel project to be built in India by a non-American company just to make good on a sales deal between two firms who apparently had no need for free market underwriting, and get it done in a matter of only days - is one slick crony capitalist.

Thought for the Day ...from The Political Environment
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." - Edward Abbey