The Autoblog team wishes you and yours a very merry Christmas and happy times this holiday season. We're going to take it easy today and take pleasure in some quality time by friends and family (and we hope you do the sort), but while we're gone you can enter the final 2008 Autoblog Holiday Sweepstakes for a chance to win a DashDAQ Series II. There's still time as the entry period ends tomorrow, Friday, December 26th at 12PM EST.

We'll be back in full force tomorrow to close out 2008 with a bang, in the same state enjoy opening your presents, sipping some eggnog and sitting by the fire. We'll experience you on the other side.

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GMAC – and ergo General Motors – just got another Christmas present: the Federal Reserve has granted GMAC bank holding status. GMAC has billions of dollars of bonds coming due over the next 12 months, but doesn't have the liquidity to cover the obligations. As of last week, the financing company was in the midst of a bond buyback effort in order to raise enough money to qualify for bank holding status. Now that it's been granted, GMAC can tap the Troubled Asset Relief Fund intended for financial institutions, pay its debts and (probably) avoid bankruptcy.

It isn't clear, however, whether or not GMAC as a matter of fact raised enough money through the bond buyback. The Fed said "emergency conditions" justified its actions, which makes us think the Fed just said "Here, take it." Looked at from a dealer perspective, it makes sense: if GMAC had gone under, one dealer estimated that it would have taken 30-40% of GM dealers down through it, and that could imperil GM itself. It wouldn't make much sense to let that fall out when the government just loaned GM a bunch of money to stay in business.

And while GM is still a long, long way from getting the kind of money that any number of banks have, it's still beginning to add up. As a result of the new status, both GM and Cerberus are required to lower their stakes in GMAC. Cerberus has been told to lower its share to 33%, down from 51%; GM has said it will go below 10%. As for Cerberus' other headache, Chrysler Financial, it has said that if dealers put on't stop making a run on its funds, it will cease financing for dealer inventories.

[Source: Yahoo!]

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Teens are known for having a lot of time, some seriously outrageous ideas for filling that time, and a slightly obsessive need for revenge. Add a few residential succeed cameras into that mix, and what you have is a creative perversion of the entire speed camera system. Teens in Maryland have evidently been printing out the license plates numbers of rival teens, putting them on their own cars, and then purposely blasting by speed cameras posted up in residential neighborhoods. The rival teen -- or his parents -- then gets a $40 citation in the mail.

The police say they haven't heard anything about it, and the local government doesn't sound like it has draw near up with any way to prevent or limit the habit. Which means that teens will be teens, and parents will exist left to complain about it and fight the citations in court. Said one parent, "I hope the public at large will complain loudly enough that local Montgomery County government officials will change their policy of using these cameras for monetary gain. The practice of sending speeding tickets to faceless recipients without any type of verification is unwarranted and an exploitation of our rights." Oh, these kids today...

[Source: The Sentinel]

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