In Case You Missed It: At Least 78 Billion Lost in TARP

Yeah, this kind of thing cracks me up. While the Republifools are freaking out about the Citizen's Bailout bill that just passed the Senate, no one seems to be
raising a big stink about $78 billion being lost when the USG paid
$176 billion for $254 billion of bank crap--er--capital purchases from
banks. Sure, $78 billion isn't that much these days (!!) but compared
to the stuff the Republicans were bitching about yesterday it seems
pretty substantial.

The really frustrating thing for the "law and order" crowd is that former TreasSec Henry "Hank" Paulsen effectively committed fraud on Congress and the American People. According to the February 6, 2009 Bloomberg.com article capped above, the oversight panel in charge of the TARP bailout was run by a woman called Elizabeth Warren. She said, according to the Bloomberg article, that:

The panel asked Paulson in December to value
taxpayers' return on the investments, Warren said. According to
Warren, he said they were made "at or near par," meaning they received
about $1 for every $1 invested.

The panel subsequently found the value to be about 66 cents on the dollar, Warren said.

So, if you consider 66% "at or near par" with 100%, then you shouldn't have a problem. In which case, I'd like to buy all the money in your bank account for 66 cents per dollar. Sound good?

Didn't think so.

So, here we go again with another example of how Obama will be letting the previous administration get away with lying to the American people.

CHANGE HAS COME TO AMERICA and it looks really familiar!

Oh and in case you think $78 billion still isn't that much, here's something else from that Bloomberg article:

"The loss estimate is conservative," said
Representative Alan Grayson, a Florida Democrat on the House Financial
Services Committee. "It could turn out that those assets in the end
are worthless. These are massive handouts to favored institutions to
try to make up with taxpayer money the mistakes they made with
investor money."

Yeah, so it's possibly more than $78 billion. In fact, with the track record of this whole thing, I'm expecting it to definitely be more than $78 billion.

Posted via email from thepete's posterous

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