From cnbc.com:
WASHINGTON – The Treasury’s man in charge of the government’s $700 billion financial bailout program has two words for congressional overseers: It worked.
Testifying at the Congressional Oversight Panel’s final hearing on Friday, Treasury bailout chief Timothy Massad said the program “brought stability to the financial system and laid the foundation for economic recovery.”
The much-maligned Troubled Asset Relief Program is estimated to cost taxpayers $25 billion — a far cry from initial projections — and even some of the program’s harshest critics admit it helped pull markets “back from the abyss.”
“Today the panic of 2008 is a slowly fading memory, and the TARP played a role in turning the page on that grim chapter in American history,” said former Democratic Senator Ted Kaufman from Delaware, the chairman of the congressional panel.
Major Wall Street banks such as Bank of America Corp, Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Citigroup Inc have long repaid the government, and the Treasury Department has recapitalized American International Group Inc, although it still holds a 92 percent stake in the insurer.
But TARP also has many open sores, including the Obama administration’s housing rescue program.
The administration initially predicted the TARP-funded Home Affordable Modification program would help up to 4 million at-risk homeowners to avoid foreclosure. But in nearly two years of operation, the program has provided permanent loan modifications for only a little more than 600,000 homeowners.
The congressional panel estimated that HAMP will prevent fewer than 800,000 foreclosures in total.
“It is no wonder, then, that many Americans view the TARP as a program designed and executed for the benefit of Wall Street CEOs rather than Main Street homeowners,” said Kaufman.
Under what timeline as they expecting the total cost to be $25 billion?
If my crappy little regional bank is still holding $5 billion, with no plans to repay and my parents little crappy regional bank is holding $3 billion with no plans to repay, color me dubious unless they are plotting this out to 2040 or something. That and some percent haven’t been making any payments.
It wouldn’t feel so much like a scam if more of the screw-up execs had 7 years of claw backs as part of it. The whole things smacks of kleptocracy without it.
What was the chance they’d ever say it didn’t work?
Interesting thoughts:
http://gonzalolira.blogspot.com/2011/03/sustained-unemployment-confirms-failure.html
Unemployment down, jobs created?
I thought TARP was just a sideshow and that the real cash was in the “cash for trash” bailout where the Fed paid hundreds of billions of dollars for worthless derivatives and put them in funds with strange names like Maiden Lane.
Have the banks redeemed their trash?
“What was the chance they’d ever say it didn’t work?”
What was the chance you would ever admit it DID work?
Calling Shadash…