Saturday, October 2, 2010

The Damn Truth about TARP

From the left, where a slew of TARP apologists are blooming, Dean Baker does an impressive job of explaining what really went down:

The NYT Could Not Find Any Critics of the TARP

This is striking, since most of the country falls into the critics category. Apparently, the NYT doesn't know any TARP critics.

If they did, and they talked to them for their article on the end of the TARP, the critics likely would have told the NYT that the TARP preserved Wall Street as we know it. Had the market been allowed to do its magic, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and many other fine institutions would have been bankrupt. This would have redistributed more than a trillion dollars of wealth from the shareowners, the creditors, and the top executives to the rest of the country.

By providing them with loans at below market interest rates, the TARP and the much larger Fed and FDIC bailouts, allowed the banks to survive the crisis created by their own recklessness. This was like giving away food during a famine. The banks have repaid the food with interest now that the harvest has come in, but to pretend that we did not do them an enormous favor at enormous cost to taxpayers...is absurd.

The claim that we averted a second Great Depression with the TARP is a great children's story, but no one has any clue how the decision to not do the TARP would have necessitated a second Great Depression. The first Great Depression was the result of a decade of bad policy, not just an initial policy failure at its onset.

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