Concerns grow over Treasury's handling of $700B bailout

by David Barstow
New York Times
January 9, 2009

In a report scheduled to be released today, the congressional panel overseeing the $700 billion federal bailout has expressed growing concern about the effectiveness and execution of the rescue plan.
A draft of the report criticized the Treasury Department for its "shifting explanations" about the underlying purpose of the bailout, its failure to answer many of the panel's questions and its failure to require financial institutions receiving bailout money to fully account for how they are using the public's money.
"The recent refusal of certain private financial institutions to provide any accounting of how they are using taxpayer money undermines public confidence," the draft of the report said. "For Treasury to advance funds to these institutions without requiring more transparency further erodes the very confidence Treasury seeks to restore."
The 45-page report also asserted that the Treasury, in defiance of what the panel claimed was Congress' clear intent when it passed the bailout bill in October, had taken "no steps to use any of this money to alleviate the foreclosure crisis."
The Treasury declined to comment on the panel's latest findings with the bailout, known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
But in testimony to Congress and elsewhere, Neel Kashkari, the Treasury official overseeing the bailout, repeatedly has asserted that the rescue plan is in fact working as intended. While cautioning that its full effect will take time to register, he has argued that the rescue plan already has begun to reduce foreclosures while also providing crucial stability and liquidity to the financial system.
According to a New York Times running tally, the Treasury already has committed $359 billion of the $700 billion to banks, credit-card companies, automakers and insurance companies, among others. The oversight panel's latest assessments are likely to fuel the debate over how to spend the remainder of the bailout money.
The congressional oversight panel has three Democratic appointees and two Republican appointees. It is led by Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor and expert on bankruptcy and credit-card issues. A spokesman for the panel declined to comment on the draft report.
The preliminary report raises new questions about the single biggest component of the bailout, the Capital Purchase Program, under which the government has invested tax dollars into scores of banks it judges to be healthy. According to the Treasury, the government has injected $177.5 billion in bailout money into 214 financial institutions.
The report, though, questioned whether the Treasury could accurately assess the health of these banks, especially given the collapses of several banks that once were deemed to be healthy.