Report: Bailout Money Ended Up in Foreign Hands
Courtesy of Jr. Deputy Accountant
The Congressional Oversight Panel has found (!) some disturbing new information surrounding 2008’s most not excellent bailout programs, among them, details on where exactly AIG’s cash infusions went. Here’s a hint: it wasn’t back into the system.
WaPo:
Members of the Congressional Oversight Panel, in a report due out Thursday, note that America’s broad financial rescues had more impact internationally than the narrower bailout programs of other countries had on U.S. firms.
They cite as a case study the bailout of insurance giant American International Group. While the Treasury committed up to $70 billion to AIG through its Troubled Assets Relief Program, the report states, much of that money ended up in the coffers of foreign trading partners in France, Germany and other countries. The cash that the United States poured into AIG alone equaled twice what France spent on its total capital injection program, and half what Germany spent.
"The point we make forcefully in this report is that there were no data about where this money was going, no information about where this money was going," said panel chair Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor. "Without that information, no one could make a deliberate policy choice" about whether to ask foreign governments to contribute to the financial rescues.
Isn’t that why Warren has a job? To figure that out?
And yet for all her pristine carrying on over who got what, it appears as though someone forgot to turn off the spigot. But now instead of the banks and the auto companies, the bailouts are being pumped out to homedebtors, college students, whoever the hell is stupid enough to have a stake in Fannie and Freddie and of course broke ass state and local governments who can’t pay their bills.
The outrage over the bailouts of late 2008 and most of 2009 is obvious but where is the oversight committee to say enough is e-f*&king-nough already and cut it off?!
Reports. Meh.
