Hillary Clinton Supported TARP; Bernie Sanders says Break Up The Banks

[CdnExtraNational]

I remember in 2008 everyone called their Congressmen and Senators to oppose the TARP program.

TARP was defeated!

Then Hank Paulson and all threatened to take down the economy.

They got a bank bailout with no strings attached.

The Goldman Sachs wing won the day!

Representative Democracy failed.

All that was needed was an amendment to TARP to BREAK UP THE BANKS that had just proven they were too big to fail...

But instead we got this...

Top CEO Tells Elizabeth Warren He Is Above The Law

[Buzz Clik]

1. ... and screw the other industries that could benefit.

[Adrahil]

2. Some folks have no idea what would have happened had TARP not been passed.

Many of us here would have had their saving wiped out. It might be emotionally satisfying to call for banks to fail, but the reality would be very, VERY ugly.

Now, you wanna argue that there should have been efforts to prosecute and break up the banks? I don't necessarily disagree, but cutting off one's to spite one's face is a terrible idea.

[think]

3. It was ugly for millions of Americans that lost homes, jobs, & pensions due to the criminal acts of

the banks.

Bernie Sanders wasn't against any type of bailout. He was against one like TARP that rewarded those banks while letting those millions suffer.

Even the Inspector General who oversaw TARP claimed Washington sold out main street to bail out Wall street:

Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street

by Neil Barofsky

In telling of his stranger-than-fiction baptism into the corrupted ways of Washington, Barofsky offers an irrefutable indictment, from an insider of the Bush & Obama administrations, of the mishandling of the $700 billion TARP bailout fund. In behind-the-scenes detail, he shows the extreme degree to which government officials bent over backward to serve the interests of Wall Street firms at the expense of the public—& at the expense of effective financial reform. During the height of the financial crisis in 2008, Barofsky gave up his job as a prosecutor in the US Attorney’s Office in NYC, where he'd convicted drug kingpins, Wall Street executives & mortgage fraud perpetrators, to become the special inspector general in charge of oversight of bailout money spending. From the first his efforts to protect against fraud & to hold big banks accountable for how they spent taxpayer money were met with outright hostility from Treasury officials in charge of the bailouts.

Barofsky discloses how, in serving banking interests, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner & his team worked with Wall Street executives to design programs to would funnel vast amounts of taxpayer money to their firms & would have allowed them to game the markets & make huge profits with almost no risk or accountability, while repeatedly fighting efforts to put the necessary fraud protections in place. His investigations also uncovered abject mismanagement of the bailout of insurance giant AIG & Geithner’s decision to allow the payment of millions of dollars in bonuses & that the Obama administration’s TARP Czar lobbied for the executives to retain their high pay....

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15737379-bailout

[Adrahil]

5. That's great. Did Bernie's plan have a chance of passing?

Sometimes, you bite the bullet and do what has to be done.

[think]

6. Bite the bullet. Do you agree with what the Inspector General said about TARP or not?

[Adrahil]

10. I haven;t read the book, so can;t say. But...

I do agree that there was not enough relief for "main street."

But it's also not like more ideas were floated, but they simply did not have enough support. For example, we really needed some forced (and I mean FORCED) alterations of mortgages, including even write-off of principal. We also needed a MUCH bigger stimulus (again, proposed by Obama, went no where). Also, some banksters ought to be in jail for fraud. But in the end, we could not allow the finance system in this country to collapse.

[beedle]

8. When you say "many people"

do you mean you? Because many people did lose their savings anyway. And the banks were given a shit pile of money in order to try and help the economy and save the jobs and investment of a lot of Americans, and all they did was hoard the money, use it to pay off some of their higher interest loans with lower interest loans, and hoarded the rest of it.

It would have been better to let the banks fail and use the money to reimburse the savings of people who would would have been affected by that failure.

The absolute worst thing to let happen is what happened. It was the least efficient, and most painful of ways to a recovery.

[Adrahil]

11. So, what do you think would have happened had the entire banking system collapsed? NT

[beedle]

13. easy

no money would have gotten out to the big banks where it would have been, as was the reason for the bailout money, loaned out to people and small businesses in order to stimulate the economy .... which is exactly what happened anyway http://tinyurl.com/jdek8y2


The only thing that was saved was CEO and hedge fund manager bonuses.

[INdemo]

4. The banks got a double dip

They gambled and lost with risky investments then AIG covered the bank loses.
Taxpayers then covered AIG's loses and turned around and gave the banks Billions covering their loses (a double dip)
Hank Paulson did that he broke the law and so did the Bankers by committing fraud
They had already recovered their loses once.
Example suppose you total your car in an accident.The insurance company pays off your loan to the bank. Then the bank comes to you and demands that you pay your loan off because of no collateral. That's a double dip and that is what the banks did to the taxpayers.
Bernie Sanders voted against this fraudulent action by the
banks /government

[pat_k]

7. and promises of legislation prevent future meltdowns proved to be totally empty. (nt)

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

9. Pay to bail out the billionaires and be told it's good for us to further enrich them.

[AtomicKitten]

12. And Larry Summers argued for TARP bank executives to still get bonuses.

http://money.cnn.com/2009/07/30/news/companies/bonuses_tarp/