Special IG: Treasury Department Bungled TARP Boondoggle

From The American Thinker:

October 27, 2010


Special IG: Treasury bungled TARP boondoggle

Rick Moran

It's bad enough they spent $800 billion on god-knows-what (we still don't have a complete accounting). But the report by Special Inspector General Neil Barofsky is so ridiculously critical of the Treasury Department's handling of TARP funds and procedures, that it seems that not only heads should roll, but people should go to jail.



The Examiner has excerpts from the IG's report:





When Treasury refuses for more than a year to require TARP recipients to account for the use of TARP funds, or claims that Capital Purchase Program participants were "healthy, viable" institutions knowing full well that some are not, or when it provides hundreds of billions of dollars in TARP assistance to institutions, and then relies on those same institutions to self-report any violations of their obligations to TARP, it damages the public's trust to a degree that is difficult to repair.



[...]



[T]he most specific of TARP's Main Street goals, "preserving homeownership," has so far fallen woefully short, with TARP's portion of the Administration's mortgage modification program yielding only approximately 207,000 (out of a total of 467,000) ongoing permanent modifications since TARP's inception, a number that stands in stark contrast to the 5.5 million homes receiving foreclosure filings and more than 1.7 million homes that have been lost to foreclosure since January 2009.





The section on lending is jaw dropping. Recall that TARP was created to free up the frozen credit markets. How's that working out for ya, Barry?





TARP has failed to ‘increase lending,' with small businesses in particular unable to secure badly needed credit. Indeed, even now, overall lending continues to contract, despite the hundreds of billions of TARP dollars provided to banks with the express purpose to increase lending.





Don't forget we've got the most transparent administration in history:





...[M]any Americans to continue to view TARP with anger, cynicism, and mistrust. While some of that hostility may be misplaced, much of it is based on entirely legitimate concerns about the lack of transparency, program mismanagement and flawed decision-making processes that continue to plague the program.





This is criminal. If not, it should be. Negligence and incompetence, if not outright fraud at this order of magnitude has rarely, if ever, been seen. The question is, what is Obama going to do about it?



If you guessed ignore the IG and continue to praise Timmy Geithner for the great job he's doing, you'd be correct.













Posted at 09:08 AM