Posted on 02/18/2009 10:14:29 AM PST by xcamel
While government leaders were well-intentioned in setting up the Troubled Asset Relief Program, it’s a “lousy program,” U.S. Bancorp CEO Richard Davis said at a business leaders forum Tuesday.
U.S. Bank was told, not asked, to participate in the program, which is a Darwinian attempt to “synthesize” weaker banks into stronger banks through consolidation, Davis said at the forum, held at Thrivent Financial for Lutherans in Minneapolis. U.S. Bank (NYSE: USB) sold $6.6 billion in preferred stock with warrants to the U.S. Treasury in November through its capital purchase program.
“There’s no A, R or P in TARP,” Davis said, adding that “troubled” is the only word in the phrase that’s accurate. “The ‘asset relief program’ has yet to occur.”
The problems with the U.S. Treasury Department’s program are that its goals and rules have changed since its inception last fall, it’s poorly defined and it’s caused collateral damage to healthy banks.
Davis said he would be “darned” if Minneapolis-based U.S. Bank would suffer collateral damage from the government’s “sloppy attempt at nationalizing the [banking] industry.”
U.S. Bank, which has $247 billion in assets, was the sixth-largest commercial bank in the country as of the end of the third quarter of 2008. It has more than 2,500 banking offices in 24 states.
U.S. Bank is Oregon’s largest bank, with 186 branches and more than 4,700 employees statewide. U.S. Bank has 103 branches and 3,925 employees in the Portland metropolitan area.
This guy better sleep with one eye open. He may just disappear.
Just say NO. It has lot of meaning now.
When banks that are in good shape are forced to take TARP funds just to stop other banks with TARP funds from taking them over, it proves it was a very poorly thought out idea.
Understatement of the year.
U.S. Bank was told, not asked, to participate in the program,no questions here msm awol.
IOW, his bank didn’t fool around with derivatives, the “assets” of the “relief program.”
I wouldn’t be quite so quick to put this on Paulson... I smell Dodd, Frank, and the O’bummer transition team...
One of the major causes of bank failures is the lack of competition. To many smaller, effective local banks were taken over by the big names, so the consolidated banks had too much of the market, causing failure because of their ill-informed practices.
Wrong... blame 90% of it on goverment mandates since the RTC days.
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