77 Fraud, Money Laundering, Insider Trading, and Tax Evasion Investigations Underway Regarding TARP
by ilene - January 31st, 2010 5:17 pm
My belief is the benefits of TARP and the entire alphabet soup of lending facilities was not as stated by Bernnake and Geithner, but rather to shift as much responsibility as quickly as possible on to the backs of taxpayers while trumping up nonsensical benefits of doing so. This was done to bail out the banks at any and all cost to the taxpayers. – Mish
77 Fraud, Money Laundering, Insider Trading, and Tax Evasion Investigations Underway Regarding TARP
Courtesy of Mish
Inquiring minds are reading the SIGTARP Quarterly Report To Congress. The report is a massive 224 pages long. I will do my best to condense it down to the critical highlights involving Fraud, Money Laundering, Insider Trading, etc.
Let’s start with the SIGTARP mission, then the findings.
Mission
SIGTARP’s mission is to advance economic stability by promoting the efficiency and effectiveness of TARP management, through transparency, through coordinated oversight, and through robust enforcement against those, whether inside or outside of Government, who waste, steal or abuse TARP funds.
Let’s dive into the 224 page report and see how well TARP, and the alphabet soup of lending facilities met their stated goals.
On the positive side, there are clear signs that aspects of the financial system are far more stable than they were at the height of the crisis in the fall of 2008. Many large banks have once again been able to raise funds in the capital markets, and some institutions — including some that appeared to be on the verge of collapse — have recovered sufficiently to repay their TARP investments years earlier than most would have predicted. These repayments and the sales of the warrants associated with them have meant that Treasury (and thus the taxpayer) has turned a profit on some of the individual TARP investments; as a result of these repayments, among other positive developments, it now appears that the ultimate cost of TARP to the American taxpayer, while still substantial, might be significantly less than initially estimated.
Mish: The idea that there are "profits" is fictitious. It’s effectively praising making 10 cents on a dollar while not counting hundreds of $billions lost on AIG and Fannie Mae, and ignoring $300 billion worth of loan guarantees at Citigroup still in effect.
Moreover, the only reason banks…