Ethics

The Failures of TARP

By Ed Brayton

Mike Lillis has an important article at the Michigan Messenger about the fact that the $700 billion TARP program has been an abysmal failure. We were told relentlessly that the credit markets were frozen and that we had to act immediately to buy up all those troubled assets (hence the name of the freaking thing, the Troubled Assets Relief Program) in order to get the banks able to lend again.

Well guess what? We didn't buy up any of those troubled assets at all and the credit markets are still frozen. We got hoodwinked, folks. In fact, banks that received funds from the TARP program actually lent less than banks that didn't:

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on February 19, 2009 (boomark / email).