Posted on 07/27/2012 11:45:40 AM PDT by Kartographer
Much has been made about Barofsky's criticism of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who told CBS News he is "deeply offended" by how he's portrayed in Barofsky's book Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street.
Barofsky pulled no punches in our earlier segment about the ongoing rate-rigging scandal. (See: "I Hope We See People In Handcuffs": Neil Barofsky Weighs in on LIBOR Scandal)
In the accompanying video, we focused more on TARP's failings to live up to its promise to help individual Americans, not just the big banks.
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
Audit the Fed passed overwhelmingly in the house today, complete by-partisan support, suddenly Harry Ried a champion of auditing the Fed thinks maybe it’s a bad idea now. Personaly I think the powers that be are afraid of what they may find, that the Fed has been bailing out foriegn banks and governments and that the Fed itself is broke and has been printing money to stay solvent. If that information was made public the dollar would indeed colapse.
TARP failure is so NOT Bush’s fault
hell half the money ($350Billion) didn’t even get requested until Bush’s’ last 8 days of office
No sir, obama (”office of the president elect”) and Geithner had control of the TARP slush fund, OBAMA called the bankers into his office in early 2009 and doled out the money to them, obama and pelosi doled out TARP money to GM and the UAW (totally NOT what it was requested for in the TARP act) and OBAMA is responsible for how it was wasted
Bungling Ben and his Merry Men at the Fed will start to inflate dollars as soon as the economy begins to breathe again. The only way to try to make a dent in our horrendous mountain of debt is to devalue the dollars we owe. Everyone will suffer, because inflation is the most devastating tax of all.
How could the Fed be broke? You must have a unique definition of the word. Why don't you share?
The bank TARP was doled out while Bush was President. Before the election for the biggest banks.
Go back and read your history
TARP wasn’t even voted on until 4 October 2008
The first “allocations” for “stock purchase” in the banks were made on 28 October
Paulson summons bankers to DC and warns them to take the TARP money..... or else
By November Pelosi et al were hammering on Bush to use TARP money to save GM. Bush caved. By December TARP money was flowing into GM and the UAW
The democrats were also hammering Bush to ask for and release the entire $700 Billion in TARP before obama took office so he could have all the money to use. Bush caved. 8 days before the inauguration Bush asked that all TARP be released. It was.
obama and Larry Summers vowed to institute controls over TARP
http://moneymorning.com/2009/01/13/obama-tarp/
By Feb 2009 about $300 Billion of the $700 Billion was spent
In March obama summons the bankers to DC and tells them they cannot simply repay TARP Paulson forced on them, and they better spread the wealth because he is all that stands between them and “the pitchforks”
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/obama-is-expected-to-meet-with-top-bankers/
By June 2009 the top 10 banks that Paulson forced to take TARP, repay TARP (with interest) despite Geithner obstacles to them doing so, to get govt out of their executive boardroom decisions.
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/jpmorgan-repays-treasury-as-tarp-exits-continue/
Go back and read your history
TARP wasn’t even voted on until 4 October 2008
The first “allocations” for “stock purchase” in the banks were made on 28 October
Paulson summons bankers to DC and warns them to take the TARP money..... or else
By November Pelosi et al were hammering on Bush to use TARP money to save GM. Bush caved. By December TARP money was flowing into GM and the UAW
The democrats were also hammering Bush to ask for and release the entire $700 Billion in TARP before obama took office so he could have all the money to use. Bush caved. 8 days before the inauguration Bush asked that all TARP be released. It was.
obama and Larry Summers vowed to institute controls over TARP
http://moneymorning.com/2009/01/13/obama-tarp/
By Feb 2009 about $300 Billion of the $700 Billion was spent
In March obama summons the bankers to DC and tells them they cannot simply repay TARP Paulson forced on them, and they better spread the wealth because he is all that stands between them and “the pitchforks”
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/obama-is-expected-to-meet-with-top-bankers/
By June 2009 the top 10 banks that Paulson forced to take TARP, repay TARP (with interest) despite Geithner obstacles to them doing so, to get govt out of their executive boardroom decisions.
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/jpmorgan-repays-treasury-as-tarp-exits-continue/
Go back and read your history
TARP wasn’t even voted on until 4 October 2008
The first “allocations” for “stock purchase” in the banks were made on 28 October
I've read my history. That's how I knew that October 28th was before the election.
Not if you count the fact most of TARP is folded into the baseline budgeting process.
TARP was the most blatant case of bait and switch ever perpetrated on taxpayers. Tarp was sold as an idea that the govt would purchase the toxic mortgage assets from the banks at steeply discounted rates. This would allow the govt to place all toxic assets in a traunch and sell them off after the markets quieted down and a reasonable idea of the relative pperformance of the underlying mortgages could be ascertained. The bank in turn would have had smaller balance sheets but they would be rock solid grade a assets. once they got the money they found out the banks had no intention of selling these mortgage assets to the govt so they just gave them the money instead in exchange for equity and preferred stock. Anyone involved in tarp is guilty of fraud against the american people and as far as i’m concerned the sooner we see perp walks the better.
Wouldn't have been enough. And imagine the losses the Treasury would have suffered. The bank TARP made money. We'd be down hundreds of billions on the toxic crap they would have bought.
Anyone involved in tarp is guilty of fraud against the american people and as far as i’m concerned the sooner we see perp walks the better.
The American people don't have a clue one way or the other about TARP. But you should hold your breath waiting for a perp walk.
Did TARP become part of the annual Federal Government baseline? If so, what is happening each year to the money - I assume it isn’t going to the banks still?
TARP was sold to Congress as a financial aid to the foreclosure crisis. Barofsky’s point it that Tarp would never have been approved if it hadn’t had the promises that the banks would help homeowners.
They didn’t. For the most part, the homeowners under water got zero help from all those banks and mortgage companies.
Instead, The money was used by the big banks and institutions for purposes outside of the original idea. It is just wrong.
GAO: Banks Paying Back TARP with Federal Money
The GAO adds that this issue of round-tripping federal bailout money arises with small banks, as the government essentially replaced their TARP funding with the new federal Small Business Lending Fund enacted in 2010, which GOP Congressmen have dubbed “TARP 2.0.”
Yes, there were a lot of small banks involved with this, but the aggregate amount was tiny compared to the TARP program as a whole:
From this calculation, we can see that the amount in the program identified by the GAO that was round-tripped was approximately $2 billion.
(There was a second program identified by GAO as involving round-tripping of funds to TARP, which was the Community Development Capital Initiative. However, the aggregate amount funded under CDCI was only $570 million, and only 28 of the 84 recipients round-tripped, so the amount used to repay TARP from this program was immaterial.)
According to that GAO report, as of January 31, 2012, Treasury received back $211.5 billion from the banks, exceeding its disbursements of $204.9 billion.
So even if we subtract the $2 billion that was round-tripped under that program, the Treasury STILL received more than it disbursed, with the possibility of more coming.
And don't get me wrong - I am completely against the government taking ownership interests in any of the banks, whether under TARP or any other program.
In my view, this focus on TARP is being peddled by the Left as a part of their larger effort to demonize the banks in the public perception to set up the eventual nationalization of the banks.
And, this is to distract attention from the role of the Left in destroying the sound mortgage credit standards that were used by banks for generation after generation. This was accomplished by falsely claiming the banks were racist for adhering to sound mortgage-lending standards.
This "affirmative-action" housing collapse has destroyed literally trillions of dollars of national wealth by a tremendous misallocation of resources in the economy, and control by Democrat politicians of Fannie/Freddie has resulted in vast sums of taxpayer money lost which will never be seen again, unlike the disbursements to the banks under TARP.
Thanks for the reply.
I don’t agree that the left is focussing on TARP to demonize the banks.
No. 1 a marority of Democrats in a democrat majority Congress voted for TARP. As soon as you mention that, they defend TARP.
No. 2. the left uses the fact of TARP to justify MORE government giveaway programs. So TARP is very handy for them politically.
TARP “did help prevent financial Armageddon,” he concedes.
That’s all TARP as originally proposed by Paulson was meant to do. Pelosi and the Democrats loaded it up with all the crap that failed.
Ryan on TARP (he voted for it). Pretty accurate as the Dems bastardized it far away from its original purpose.
In his 2013 budget, the House Budget chairman accuses the Treasury Department of having diverted TARP from its original purpose of “providing targeted assistance to unlock credit markets” and turning the program “into an ad hoc, opaque bailout and a slush fund for large private institutions.” Although Ryan’s budget acknowledges that TARP “succeeded in halting a systemic panic,” the budget also concludes that TARP has “morphed into crony capitalism at its worst.”
Good post. Spot on.
Government should not save companies from the consequences of their bad decisions.
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