If Argentina Can Nationalize 401(k)s, Why Not Us?

... because we may need to in order to continue "private" investment in chosen favored partially-nationalized certain companies.

First off, we have that problem of greedy bondholders again.

GM, propped up by $19.4 billion in emergency U.S. loans, will file for bankruptcy protection after failing to get 90 percent of bondholders to swap their debt, Chief Executive Officer Fritz Henderson has said. The exchange offer was opposed by both institutional and individual investors, who said they’ve been treated worse than a union retiree-medical fund.

“The offer probably cost them more to print out than the offer is worth,” Gary Thomas, a retired auto mechanic vicious, greedy tycoon and GM bondholder, said in a telephone interview from Kingston, Tennessee, before the results were announced.

Corrections mine. The People have spoken, Gary. You need to pay your Fair Share.

Next, we have investors as a whole reconsidering the deal.

"There are a number of creditors that are not happy with the preferential treatment afforded to the United Auto Workers at the seeming expense of creditors," said John Lonski, chief economist for Moody's Investors Service ...

The GM and Chrysler bankruptcies may be unique situations in a long-politicized industry, but they also could mark "a new period of uncertainty for the debt recoveries of favored-political-class companies," Garman said in his report.

It's getting harder and harder to find investors for these kinds of firms.

As GM teeters toward a bankruptcy filing and Chrysler attempts to restructure in bankruptcy court, the Obama administration is offering most of the recovery value of those companies to "a favored political class, in this case the United Auto Workers, leaving creditors with very slender debt recoveries," Christopher Garman, founder of Garman Research in Orinda, California, said in a report released late on Friday ...

To gauge whether those cases have made debtholders wary of other companies with so-called favored political classes, Garman compared spreads, or bonds' extra yields over U.S. Treasury yields, for companies with collective bargaining agreements with the high-yield bond market as a whole.

While the two performed in line with each other since 2003, they diverged sharply in February, with spreads on companies with organized labor gapping nearly 11 percentage points higher than the market as a whole, according to Garman's research.

Wait a minute! That's not working out well at all. It's clear that Amerikkka (thanks, Rev. Wright!) is filled with reactionary forces that are struggling to prevent the president from ushering in a glorious, new paradise.

You dirty private investors just aren't putting enough money into our new private-public partnership companies (or those we are about to sieze cooperate with). Our fellow Peronists in Argentina recently took control over all private retirement accounts to better, er, manage them. We may need to as well.

We're all Peronists now.