WSJ: TARP Was No Win for the Taxpayers

Treasury’s claim that the bank bailouts will return a profit ignores the other, more costly programs enabling the banks to repay their TARP funds.

The Wall Street Journal, Mar 17, 2011

… Special Inspector General for TARP criticized Treasury in October for inadequately disclosing a change in its valuation methodology that reduced a $45 billion loss in AIG to $5 billion, making TARP losses appear smaller than they really are. This data manipulation is only part of a much larger problem with Treasury’s representations regarding the supposed success of the bank bailout payments that lie at the heart of TARP.

The focus on repayment fails to consider the huge taxpayer costs from non-TARP programs that directly and indirectly enabled many of the large banks to repay their TARP funds. These intertwined programs, operated by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve, dwarf the size of TARP and lack its accountability.

… The Congressional Budget Office estimates that Treasury’s bailout of the GSEs [Government Sponsored Entities, like Fannie Mae and Freddy Mack] will cost the taxpayers approximately $380 billion through fiscal year 2021. If only one-fourth of CBO’s estimate ultimately benefits TARP recipients and other financial institutions, taxpayers will have provided a subsidy to these institutions of approximately $100 billion, which is not accounted for under TARP.

…. TARP was never where the real action was happening. In fact, other Fed and FDIC programs added another $2 trillion of taxpayer money at risk to the 19 stress-tested banks alone, on top of the $1.1 trillion of MBS purchased by the Fed. TARP is but one-eighth of that total.

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Big bank bailouts and ‘secret Fed loans’ 2007-2010

The Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury Department ‘flushed’ billions of dollars (courtesy of tax-paying U.S. citizens) out through their big-big-bank-connected umbilical cord credit extension system during the height of the Great Financial Crisis.

The ‘biggest of the big’ made out well – and their insiders did even better.

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“Secrets and Lies of the Bailout” –  RollingStone, Jan 4, 2013 

Goldman Sachs, which had made such a big show of being reluctant about accepting $10 billion in TARP money, was quick to cash in on the secret loans being offered by the Fed. By the end of 2008, Goldman had snarfed up $34 billion in federal loans – and it was paying an interest rate of as low as just 0.01 percent for the huge cash infusion. Yet that funding was never disclosed to shareholders or taxpayers, a fact Goldman confirms. “We did not disclose the amount of our participation in the two programs you identify,” says Goldman spokesman Michael Duvally.

Goldman CEO Blankfein later dismissed the importance of the loans, telling the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission that the bank wasn’t “relying on those mechanisms.” But in his book, Bailout, Barofsky says that Paulson told him that he believed Morgan Stanley was “just days” from collapse before government intervention, while Bernanke later admitted that Goldman would have been the next to fall.

Meanwhile, at the same moment that leading banks were taking trillions in secret loans from the Fed, top officials at those firms were buying up stock in their companies, privy to insider info that was not available to the public at large. Stephen Friedman, a Goldman director who was also chairman of the New York Fed, bought more than $4 million of Goldman stock over a five-week period in December 2008 and January 2009 – years before the extent of the firm’s lifeline from the Fed was made public. Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit bought nearly $7 million in Citi stock in November 2008, just as his firm was secretly taking out $99.5 billion in Fed loans. Jamie Dimon bought more than $11 million in Chase stock in early 2009, at a time when his firm was receiving as much as $60 billion in secret Fed loans. When asked by Rolling Stone, Chase could not point to any disclosure of the bank’s borrowing from the Fed until more than a year later, when Dimon wrote about it in a letter to shareholders in March 2010.

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It is now time untangle America from this twisted political mess and get us back to a citizen-driven economy.

It is time to grant U.S. citizens the same direct liquidity access that was ‘gifted’ to major banks and insurers during 2007 – 2010.

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