- So, now it turns out that the whole Troubled Assets Relief
Program (TARP) was a flop or more likely a scam. Remember Bush Treasury
Secretary Henry Paulson telling us last September that credit markets had
locked up, and then, after half of the $750 billion that he extorted out
of Congress was handed out to Wall Street firms, new President Barack Obama
justifying the spending of the second half of the money because we needed
to "get the banks lending again"?
-
- Well,
now Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for TARP, is telling us
that all that money, and another more than $2 trillion in loans, accomplished
nothing. In an interview with Lagan Sebert, published in Huffington
Post, Barofsky says, "We were told by Treasury that the purpose of
the TARP fund was to increase lending. But we haven't increased lending."
-
- Well
yeah, that's true. Just ask any ordinary working stiff. My little bank,
the Harleysville National Bank here in eastern Pennsylvania, far from expanding
lending, has been shutting down customer credit lines. As a bank manager
told me, they were "reviewing all our equity lines" in light
of declining property values (actually, property values in our area north
of Philadelphia have remained pretty stable). In general, banks across
the country have been canceling credit lines, closing credit card accounts
on customers deemed risky-including small businesses-and making it very
hard to get a new mortgage. (They've also been raising all kinds of fees,
ripping customers off in other ways, but that's another story.)
-
- And
that goes for the biggest banks that got billions of dollars in taxpayer
bailout funds.
-
- Barofsky
has been trying doggedly to find out whatever happened to all that money
of ours that was shoveled out to the banks, and as he reports, he's been
working not just without any help from the Treasury Department, but actually
against the active resistance of Treasury, which he accuses of having tried
to dissuade him from even looking into it.
-
- "My
biggest surprise," he says, "is when we announced an audit (of
TARP), Treasury went out of their way to sayit would be a big waste of
time."...
-
- For the rest of this story, please go to:
- http://www.thiscantbehappening.net
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