I am in the midst of reading the First Report of the Congressional Oversight Panel for Economic Stabilization from December 10, 2008. Click here for a .pdf version. For a report of this type, it's quite easy to read and asks all of the right questions, though not a lot of answers are forthcoming yet.
I also stumbled on a chart produced by the Wall Street Journal which includes the names of over 200 financial institutions who have received some of the TARP funding. The total disbursed through the end of the year is nearly $250 billion dollars. I have not figured out what the remaining $100 billion of the total $350 billion supposedly disbursed by the government, but I'm going to keep rooting around for it.
A second oversight panel was published a few days ago. Once I finish the first report, I'll go through the second report. I haven't heard anything from cable news outlets or any of the other blogs on whether or not they were able to figure out what the 200+ companies are doing with their quarter of a trillion dollars. But it looks like Senator Dodd is trying to demand more accountability for the remaining $350 billion.
However, when one of the quotes mentioned in the CBS article I linked above mentions needing "..to put a tourniquet on the 9,000 foreclosures that are occurring every day..", seems to me is that all it will take is some kind of metaphoric sneeze for all involved to assume the economy is in the midst of some kind of bout of pneumonia and the money all goes out the door gift wrapped.
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