John “Bradshaw” Layfield of Layfield Energy thinks General Motors Corp. whatever it takes to wine and dine its biggest customers and become successful – even if that means offering lap dances.
“I run a business and if you can tell me I can spend $2 million and bring in $60 billion in revenue from my clients that are gonna be there, I will do it every day of the week, and I will recommend that General Motors does it,” Layfield said on Fox News Channel’s “Cashin’ In.” “They’d better get ‘em lap dances, they’d better buy ‘em hotel rooms, they’d better get ‘em Eliot Spitzer’s black book if they have to do it. At that amount of return this is naive for somebody to bash this.”
The “Cashin’ In” crew were discussing GM’s customer retreat on the May 9 program. 500 of GM’s largest customers attended last week’s retreat at
Although the company reported $6 billion in losses last quarter and received over $15 billion in government bailout aid, Layfield and some other analysts defended GM’s spending.
But Rebecca Diamond of FOX Business Network did not defend GM for hosting the resort trip with bailout money. Instead, Diamond condemned the business trip as unnecessary and compared it to borrowing money out of desperation, but then squandering it. She compared GM’s action to saying, “I’m gonna go out and party! I’m gonna take a little vacation and I’m gonna bring all my friends with me.”
Jonathan Hoenig, managing member of a private investment partnership, didn’t complain about GM’s retreat but attacked the broader issue about the government bailout putting private business decisions under intense scrutiny. “We’re always gonna have an opinion about the better way in which bailout money should be spent. The bailout money should have never been given in the first place,” he vented.
All that scrutiny has helped Obama become increasingly bold in interfering in business decisions of companies that received bailout funds, such as when he pressured former CEO Rick Wagoner to resign from GM and persuaded Citibank to cancel plans for a $50 million private jet.
Host Terri Keenan asked Hoenig where all of this ends. Hoenig responded saying it ends with “the road to serfdom.”
“I really fear that it ends in full stage, in a fascism, socialism, whatever you want to call it,” Hoenig said. “But essentially government having complete control over our lives, and making decisions in, in the economic space for political reasons, not economic ones. And uh, its its, it could happen a lot sooner than people think.”
