What a mess the Senate has made of H.R. 1586. It’s a package of spending and revenue measures—but we’ll ignore the substance for now because they have so utterly goofed up the name. As we noted here before, this is a “shell bill.” It was introduced as one thing (TARP taxes), became another thing (an [...]
Senator John McCain admits that he abdicated responsibility with regard to the TARP program. Any member of Congress or Senator who claims to have been mislead about the contents of legislation or the powers it grants is admitting to shirking his or her responsibility. The Arizona Republic reports that Senator John McCain (R-AZ) says he [...]
Last week, President Obama unveiled a plan for something he called a ”Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee,” to be fleshed out in his forthcoming budget proposal. (More about his bank regulation plans here. They have not made it into any bill yet.) He will seek to have some set of financial services providers pay money to the government as comeuppance [...]
H.R. 2847 started its life as the Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations Act. That’s one of the big annual spending bills we talked about in this recent post. Congress didn’t pass the bill. The substance of it became law in the Consolidated Appropriations Act. Now Congress, in its infinite wisdom, is using that bill as a [...]
WashingtonWatch.com has never been profitable. Maybe someday it will be, but there aren’t enough of you yet. And also, it’s not profitable because of the downturn in the economy. Why do I say that? Because the Washington Post is reporting that the Obama administration plans to give bailout funds to millions of small businesses. The [...]
Everyone’s abuzz about the bonuses being paid out to AIG employees, some reaching above $1 million. And Congress is there on the case, chasing down the money that . . . it is responsible for putting out there in the first place. (Yes, yes, AIG money was a loan from the Fed, not TARP – [...]
The Government Accountability Office has a report out on the financial services bailout law and the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or “TARP.” As of January 23, the Treasury Department has disbursed about $293.7 billion, mostly to purchase preferred shares of 317 financial institutions. That’s a bit over $3,000 per U.S. family, just shy of $1,000 [...]
“[T]roubled assets from any financial institution.” That’s what the financial services bailout bill allowed the Treasury Department to buy: “troubled assets from any financial institution.” They were talking about bad mortgages. But then the money got used to buy pieces of financial institutions themselves. Some Members of Congress raised a stink when word circulated that [...]
I continue to be impressed by the number of bills being introduced to amend the big financial services bailout program known as the “Troubled Asset Relief Program,” or “TARP.” We discussed some of this earlier in a post called “Ready, Vote, DEBATE!” But here are all the current bills that have “Troubled Asset Relief Program” [...]