When Are Banks Going To Make Cars?

It is obvious that General Motors is not only a failed car maker, but also a failed bank. TARP money to the tune of $3.8B was released this week to "stabilize" GMAC Financial Services as it attempts to recover from heavy loses. [GMAC has already received $12.5B]. The original purpose of GMAC was to finance its customers who buy cars and trucks from General Motors Corporation. Recognize that the practice of funding car loans is in direct competition with banks, including your local community bank. To make matters worse, GMAC was in trouble, not just because of its financial practices, but because they compounded their greed by playing in the sub prime mortgage casino. Where were the regulators or were there any? As the poet Ogden Nash once observed in an applicable quip, "In the land of mules, there are no rules".
All this got me thinking. If car makers can create their own banks, why can't banks create their own cars? Why not pool their resources and produce cars to beat the gang of three in Detroit that still doesn't get the message and are returning to their "brand names", perpetuating our dependency on oil. A consortium of major and even regional banks could build a hydrogen car along with the system of refueling. They could even name the models after the sponsoring banks, like the Morgan or the Citi or the Wells Fargo--gosh they even have a stage coach logo in the mix--how prophetic.
So how is the transition from fossil fuel to renewable energy made? The gigantic oil lobby isn't going to sit about without a war on change. The answer is federal legislation that would add one penny of tax per gallon per month to the price of gasoline. People would make book in Vegas as to which would come first--the conversion from oil dependency or the payment of the national debt.
And don't forget the most important consequence of such a simple plan; no more oil money to fund the Islamic extremists currently backed by our frenemies in the Middle-East [frenemies are friends who sell us oil but are enemies who who fund Al Qaeda Islamic Fundamentalists]. If successful, the banks might then think of setting up shop to make GE light bulbs and expensive X-Ray scanners and so possibly even cut the cost of health care.
But wait just one Washington, DC minute! Weren't the banks into trying a new business when we got into this financial mess? They decided that the best business to try was the casino business using high leverage in the mortgage securitization and the multi-variant derivatives markets, and that is the very reason that they needed TARP money as well. It is high time to return the Glass-Steagall Act*, prevent banks from going into the casino business which should be left to Las Vegas and surviving high leverage players like Goldman Sachs.Recall please, that it was leverage that did in Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns. So to prevent leverage in the car business, add a provision that prevent, corporations from owning their own banks.
Car makers that can't make money by making cars should not be in banking. Banks that can't survive by their core business of lending should not make cars or light bulbs and certainly not casinos.
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*Glass-Steagall Act [The Banking Act of 1933, repealed by the Republican Congress and signed by President Clinton in 1999].