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Obama says GM faced breakup without U.S. takeover

WASHINGTON
Sat May 30, 2009 7:28pm EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama said a liquidation and bankruptcy would have been the only option in the absence of a U.S. majority stake in troubled General Motors Corp and that he expected the government to own less than 72 percent.

"My preference would have been to stay out of it completely," Obama said in an interview with NBC News recorded on Friday at the White House and aired on Saturday. "But the alternative was to see a liquidation, bankruptcy in which an enormous institution with huge importance to our economy simply gets broken up in to pieces."

(Reporting by Jim Wolf, editing by Anthony Boadle)


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