By now all of America has heard about BoA's $5 dollar a month fee to use a debit card, or $60 dollars a year just to use a standard feature of any checking account in the digital age.
The question becomes, why would anyone keep their money with Bank of America? Switch! It's easy! There are all sorts of online banks, credit unions which offer free checking, assuredly free debit card use, free ATMs and even offer interest on low balance checking.
America, vote with your consumer power and leave BoA, Wells Fargo or any other financial institution nickel and diming you to death. All these banks care about is keeping their executive bonuses rolling in.
Today we've heard from the 2008 TARP bank bail out inspector general, SIGTARP, that banks left TARP early, not because they wanted to pay back the taxpayer, or because they were financially stable....they left the bank bail out early in order to increase executive pay. The terms of TARP limited executive pay so banks were hell bent on getting out of it, despite their flimsy financial footing.
Guess who was at the top of that list? Bank of America.
Rolling Stone investigative Journalist Matt Taibbi has done it again, writing a knock down, drag out piece asking Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail? It becomes evident if you are rich, acting behind the cover of a corporation, you can get away with pretty much anything. Regular poor people, stealing a bike or a purse, you're going to jail with a felony conviction and a fine larger than your income.
SIGTARP released a new audit report, Extraordinary Financial Assistance Provided to Citigroup which should shock and awe.
Citigroup was bailed out in November 2008, with $20 billion dollars plus $301 billion in asset guarantees. Now the Special Inspector General of TARP has gone back and done an audit, a forensic accounting of what really happened.
It appears Citigroup poses systemic risk was just screamed from the roof tops like Chicken Little and the solution was to throw money at it. No one bothered to check if this was even true, that Citigroup presented a systemic collapse of the global financial system if it failed. Even worse, while systemic risk is so complex, kind of a domino theory of multi-dimensions, yet to ascertain the possibility, it was implied why bother? From the report:
First, the conclusion of the various Government actors that Citigroup had to be saved was strikingly ad hoc. While there was consensus that Citigroup was too systemically significant to be allowed to fail, that consensus appeared to be based as much on gut instinct and fear of the unknown as on objective criteria. Given the urgent nature of the crisis surrounding Citigroup, the ad hoc character of the systemic risk determination is not surprising, and SIGTARP found no evidence that the determination was incorrect.
The Great Wall Street Bail Out, TARP, gets an F for f&@&...something the middle class. Neil Barofsky grades TARP and let's just say it's more than a ruler whack across the knuckles.
SIGTARP, aka TARP Inspector General, has released a new report (large pdf) on TARP. Here are the grades per TARP's own stated objectives.
Increase lending to small business? FAIL
Decrease Unemployment? FAIL
Preserve Homeownership? FAIL
Remove Moral Hazard? FAIL
Reduce Financial Sector Size? FAIL
The above summary might be harsh, yet the report pretty much concludes the same thing. TARP was clearly a bail out for Wall Street, leaving Main Street in the dust.
It's clear SIGTARP is frustrated with Treasury. Here's an overall blast quote from the report against Tim Geithner:
I know we all believe the housing bubble has already popped and all things real estate are over. One might think this post should be from 2006 from the title. But it's not, this post is from 2010 and below are the reasons for the question.
The January 2010 SIGTARP report is released and if anything it's a validation of this sites many observations to date on TARP.
Despite the fact that the explicit goal of the Capital Purchase Program (“CPP”) was to increase financing to U.S. businesses and consumers, lending continues to decrease, month after month, and the TARP program designed specifically to address small-business lending — announced in March 2009 — has still not been implemented by Treasury.
Notwithstanding the fact that preserving home ownership and promoting jobs were explicit purposes of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (“EESA”), the statute that created TARP, nearly 16 months later, home foreclosures remain at record levels, the TARP foreclosure prevention program has only permanently modified a small fraction of eligible mortgages, and unemployment is the highest it has been in a generation.
SIGTARP notes that we are nowhere with financial reforms.
To the extent that huge, interconnected, “too big to fail” institutions contributed to the crisis, those institutions are now even larger, in part because of the substantial subsidies provided by TARP and other bailout programs.
Here's the money quote from the SIGTARP report, right in the summary:
The original terms of federal assistance to AIG, including the high interest rate it adopted from the private bank’s initial term sheet, inadequately addressed AIG’s long term liquidity concerns, thus requiring further Government support.
The new SIGTARP report is out and it's not the bombshell last month's report was.
Below is an interview with SIGTARP inspector general Neil M. Barofsky that's just dynamite. MSNBC anchor Dylan Ratigan has coined a new phrase, Corporate Communism to describe how taxpayers are getting the shaft while a select group of financial institutions can do no wrong.
An earlier post gave a preview of this report. The claim some healthy banks were receiving TARP funds was fiction and done simply to boost investor confidence.
One fact is no one knows what the hell is going on with U.S. taxpayer dollars and what the U.S. Treasury as well as the Federal Reserve are doing with it.
This hearing, is a TARP Inspector General Report hearing, otherwise known as Don't ask, don't tell.
The Great Wall Street Bail Out, TARP, gets an F for
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