“Financial Crisis Far From Over”
Though some economic measures are improving, the financial crisis “is far from over” and “appears to be taking root in the larger economy.”
This, despite the government’s commitment to spend trillions of taxpayer dollars on a massive bailout of the financial system.
These were the findings released in a report today by the Congressional Oversight Panel, the body charged with overseeing the government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, the $700 billion plan aimed at bailing out the country’s financial sector.
“We still have a long way to go. A very long way,” Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard Law School professor who chairs the panel, said in an interview today with Bloomberg News.
The panel reported that the government has spent, lent or set aside more than $4 trillion through the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
Today, the “credit markets no longer face an acute systemic crisis in confidence that threatens the functioning of the economy,” the report said.
But, it said, the economy now faces an “apparently prolonged period of weakness” with regard to financial firms and lending.
Warren also criticized the Treasury for its lack of openness on its rescue efforts as it first began the TARP program last year.
“As Treasury started this program,” she said, “they really had the notion that they would spend the money the way they wanted, and not only were they not going to tell the public, I don’t think they were going to tell the Congressional Oversight Panel.”
The Treasury Department recently unveiled a Web site dedicated to detailing the government’s financial stability efforts. On the site, the department promises that the government’s financial stability plan “will institute a new era of accountability, transparency and conditions on the financial institutions receiving funds.”
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Obongos plan right on schedule.
FOX Business News is the only org pushing Treasury for details. Liquidity issues were largely resolved when the big investment banks became bank holding companies and got access to the ‘Fed window’ for borrowing from the Fed.
The TARP is being largely used as a fund to obtain ownership and then strongarm banks to both behave in the manner Barry has wanted them to behave since his ACORN days and to pay the counterparties that the Gov’t wants paid like Union Pension Funds and foreign banks.
Treasury is working OT to keep from us that not a single ‘toxic asset’ has been acquired from the TARP.
IMO of course.