Obama Personally Approved a $126 Million Loan to Vietnam
From 2012.
President Obama has personally approved of this loan by the government-run Export-Import Bank. By law, any Export-Import Bank loan above $50 million for a communist regime must be approved by the President.
The money will be used by a telecommunications firm owned by the government.
The money must be used to buy a satellite manufactured by an American firm, Lockheed Martin.
From an economic standpoint, this loan is backed by the credit of the U.S. government. It will be funded by private investors. The loan guarantee made this loan safer for investors. Therefore, it shifted the allocation of money to Lockheed Martin by way of Vietnam.
This is the problem with all Export-Import Bank loans. They place American taxpayers on the hook for loans. Then the money flows to agencies that might otherwise not have received the money. In other words, this interferes with the free market’s allocation of capital.
This has been going on since 1945. It is an aspect of modern mercantilism.
Obama used the language that every President uses: it will cost taxpayers nothing. This is economic nonsense. If it did not place taxpayers at risk — an insurance fee not paid for by borrowers — then why did a government agency make the loan? But, following his predecessors, he announced that the loan “will help American businesses create jobs here at home and sell their products around the world -— all at no cost to taxpayers,” he said in a statement.
President Clinton in 1998 put Vietnam on the list of approved nations.
My question: Why should any nation be on the list? Why does this agency even exist?
Answer: to get favored American firms into the loop of money.
Congress can comment on the loan. It cannot reverse it unless it passes a law to reverse it. Congress never does this.
In 2011, the Ex-Im Bank loaned $33 billion.
Continue reading here.
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Published July 3, 2012. The original is here.
The "bank" fell on hard times in 2015, as Wikipedia explains.
The bank was established in 1934 by an executive order. In 1945, it was made an independent agency in the Executive Branch by Congress. It was last chartered for a three-year term in 2012 and in September 2014 was extended through June 30, 2015. Congressional authorization for the bank lapsed as of July 1, 2015. As a result, the bank could not engage in new business, but it continued to manage its existing loan portfolio. Five months later, after the successful employment of the rarely used discharge petition procedure in the House of Representatives, the U.S. Congress reauthorized the bank until September 2019 via the Fixing America's Surface Transportation Act signed into law on December 4, 2015, by President Barack Obama.
So, it could die this September. Trump could veto its extension. But will he? Wikipedia reports:
President Donald Trump, who had been dismissive of the ExIm, made an about-face in April and nominated a new head of ExIm breaking a deadlock that had prevented the Bank from operating since 2014. Trump was one of ExIm's harshest critics.
Obama had also been a critic of ExIm as a candidate. The Washington Post ran a story on this in 2014. Candidate Obama, echoing tea party, called Ex-Im Bank ‘little more than a fund for corporate welfare’.
The Post posted this classic video.
That was before he was elected . . . before the Old Boy Network took over his administration (as it takes over all administrations).