A recent Economist article notes:
Across the world governments have lavished their ailing car firms with subsidies. Although General Motors (supported with over $50 billion of taxpayers’ money) has shed some brands and factories in America, so far not a single carmaker of any size has disappeared. One of the weakest was Chrysler, but thanks to a $7 billion federal bail-out and a deal with none other than Fiat, it motors on. So too does GM’s perennially lossmaking former European arm, Opel/Vauxhall, propelled with a €4.5 billion ($6.5 billion) dowry from the German government last week into the arms of Magna, a Canadian auto-parts company, and Russia’s Sberbank.
Opel’s new owners are threatening to cut some jobs and, perhaps, shut a couple of small factories in Belgium and Britain. But the remarkable thing is that not a single car factory in Europe has closed in the past 12 months. According to industry estimates, overcapacity in Europe next year will be around 7m units, or 30%. In America, a market of similar size, overcapacity will fall from about 6m vehicles this year to 3.5m next year, but a great deal of the overcapacity elsewhere will be aimed at America when sales begin to recover.
...
Government aid, in the form of bail-outs and scrappage schemes, may have prevented outright collapse, but it has merely delayed the reckoning.
What I wonder is this: In a few years from now, if all the major car-makers are still struggling to make a profit, as the Economist predicts, are we going to see some countervailing duty cases relating to the various auto bailout subsidies? It's true that everyone was doing it, so perhaps this is a risky strategy for a company to pursue, due to the complaints that might be brought against the subsidies it received. But it is likely that some companies feel as though others got a better deal out of the bailouts, and they may be tempted to take a chance that their own trade remedy authorities will impose higher duties than authorities in other countries. (In addition, there is the possibility of personal animosity, as noted in this later Economist article, triggering a complaint: "When GM, having emerged from bankruptcy with renewed confidence, explored the possibility of hanging on to Opel, it was brutally rebuffed by the Germans. The money being offered was for Magna, not for the Americans.")
