Schapiro’s replacement matters. Simon Johnson kicked this off a few days ago, juxtaposing the bona fides of Treasury Department under secretary for domestic finance Mary Miller (a former mutual fund executive) against former Special Inspector General for TARP Neil Barofsky. There’s no question than an experienced prosecutor like Barofsky would change the SEC’s culture, but there’s almost no chance he will ever hold another job in Washington, as he was specifically told by Herb Allison right at the beginning of his book Bailout.

The Economist’s print edition gives one of the unlikelier reviews to Neil Barofsky’s Bailout and Sheila Bair’s Bull by the Horns that I’ve seen (I’ve read the former, and am making my way through the latter). In it, they acknowledge that the US bank bailouts were horribly unfair to the individual Americans who ultimately financed [...]

I’d be a bit surprised to see Neil Barofsky grace the airwaves of CNBC again. Clearly the empty suits over there don’t appreciate someone who doesn’t immediately defer to the Masters of the Universe. You simply cannot make the simple case that TARP had a specific goal to increase lending and help homeowners that went [...]

The debate over Neil Barofsky’s book has taken a turn into a broader debate over bailing out Wall Street at the expense of Main Street, which is both the right conversation to have and also kind of a dismissal of the main argument. Matt Yglesias tries to referee this debate by fitting it into this [...]

The knives have come out for Neil Barofsky and his book Bailout. Barofsky spares no one in taking on powerful subjects in his book, detailing the way in which the Treasury Department – regardless of the Administration, and more so under Tim Geithner – displays extreme deference to the banks. Geithner responded to the book [...]

It’s fair to say that former Special Inspector General for TARP, Neil Barofsky, whose book I profiled on Friday, plans to become as much a part of the national conversation over the next couple weeks as humanly possible. He got bumped from Face the Nation yesterday in favor of coverage of the Aurora, Colorado shooting, [...]

The Huffington Post described a scene in a forthcoming book by Neil Barofsky, the former Special Inspector General of TARP, where Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner delivered a string of F-bombs during a discussion about transparency. I’ve read the book, and while that’s an amusing diversion, it’s nowhere near the headline story. The important moment in [...]

I will attempt to recap my foreclosure fraud panel at Netroots Nation at some point. I know Lisa Derrick took video on her phone of the event, but apparently there’s been a hitch in getting that uploaded. Just as soon as we cross that hurdle, we’ll bring it to you. Until then, there is the [...]

Zach Goldfarb’s article on Wall Street’s runaway profits since 2008 doesn’t break a lot of new ground, it just slices and dices the Obama 2012 campaign’s new attempt to position their candidate as some kind of anti-Wall Street crusader. The largest banks are larger than they were when Obama took office and are nearing the [...]

When I summarized the House Oversight Committee hearings on TARP and foreclosures, I basically said that Democrats were the ones talking about foreclosures, for the most part. But I missed earlier in the hearing when Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) of the Republican Study Committee asked SIGTARP Neil Barofsky point-blank whether HAMP should be repealed. Barofsky [...]

The House Oversight Committee is holding its first hearing since Darrell Issa got the gavel today, and it’s on TARP and foreclosures. And that bifurcation is accurate – the Republicans on the panel, for the most part, are asking about TARP, and the Democrats are asking about foreclosures. Timothy Massad of the Treasury Department (filling [...]