Along with Dean Baker and a few others, I’ve been fighting a lonely crusade against those who insist that TARP “made money.” First of all, TARP wasn’t even the bailout, it represented about 2% of all emergency programs provided to banks. Second, the banks paying the money back they got at 0% interest and could [...]

Steve Randy Waldman gives the last word on how the banks were bailed out, contra the popular opinion that TARP “worked.” I appreciate this analogy: Suppose my kid’s meth habit got the best of him. He’s needs to come up with $100K quick or his dealer’s gonna whack him. But he’s a good kid, really! [...]

One insidious claim I’ve been trying to fight for the past couple years is this notion that TARP worked, and that the bailouts were unpalatable but necessary. The problem here is that people conflate “TARP” and “the bailouts” in unhelpful ways. If TARP worked at anything, it worked to put Congress on the hook for [...]

For perhaps the first time, President Barack Obama was forced to explain why there have been no prosecutions of Wall Street executives for their fraudulent actions during the run-up to the financial crisis. Asked by Jake Tapper to explain this behavior, Obama basically suggested that most of the actions on Wall Street weren’t illegal but [...]

The Administration is floating a massive scheme for mortgage refinancing, something that would have been an excellent idea in January 2009, but better late than never: The Obama administration is considering further actions to strengthen the housing market, but the bar is high: plans must help a broad swath of homeowners, stimulate the economy and [...]

I’m not sure if this is information we already knew from the Fed audit, or an additional set of data, or maybe just the specifics that came out of that Bloomberg FOIA request. At any rate, Bloomberg has presented it in a very direct manner with a very provocative title: “Wall Street Aristocracy Got $1.2 [...]

As Dick Polman writes today, the Obama Administration put themselves in a box on jobs that will be difficult to emerge from. While the spending cuts in the near term are not all that large, the very real shift to austerity on practical and rhetorical terms means that legitimate job creation programs are right out. [...]

Paul Krugman waltzed into the foreclosure fraud settlement today, with a column that even John McCain found himself agreeing with. That’s because it criticizes the Obama Administration for letting the banks get off easy in the aftermath of the financial crisis, and in preparing to offer a settlement on foreclosure fraud that amounts to a [...]

Every couple months, the idea that “TARP worked” bubbles up from the Administration. Usually it takes the form of saying that the economy was saved at a very low cost. But now the Treasury Department is getting bolder. They claim that, based on the latest numbers, TARP turned a profit. This is hedged with the [...]

Under Dodd-Frank, companies designated as a systemic risk to the economy are subject to greater regulation. And the Oversight Board designed to monitor systemic risk has come up with a novel way to determine those firms, allowing them to argue their way out of it! Financial companies under consideration for Federal Reserve oversight will get [...]

Well, here we go again with the TARP PR machine. Today’s story notes that Fifth Third Bank has paid back their TARP funds, meaning that 99% of all bank-delivered funds have been repaid and that the program stands to make a $20 billion profit on the bank side. This proves that old adage about lies, [...]