Taking Another Look at Bailout “Income” Sheet
Matt Taibbi at TrueSlant.com takes a slightly different view of the success of Bank Bailouts.
Citing reports from the New York Times and the Financial Times, “telling us the bailout is working because the government has made some money on TARP,” Taibbi thinks the math is selective at best.
Take a look a Matt’s argument for yourself:
“This is sort of like calculating the returns on a mutual fund by only counting the stocks in the fund that have gone up. Forgetting for a moment that TARP is only slightly relevant in the entire bailout scheme — more on that in a moment — the TARP calculations are a joke, apparently leaving out huge future losses from AIG and Citigroup and others in the red. Since only a small portion of the debt has been put down by the best borrowers, and since the borrowers in the worst shape haven’t retired their obligations yet, it’s crazy to make any conclusions about TARP, pure sophistry. Moreover, a think tank set up to analyze TARP, Ethisphere, calculated in June that TARP was still $148 billion down overall, a debt of over $1200 per American. To start talking about what a success TARP is now is beyond meaningless.”
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