{"id":262699,"date":"2010-02-01T23:01:36","date_gmt":"2010-02-02T04:01:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.szone.us\/f95\/tarp-inspector-general-same-road-faster-car-38883\/"},"modified":"2010-02-01T23:01:36","modified_gmt":"2010-02-02T04:01:36","slug":"tarp-inspector-general-same-road-faster-car","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/262699","title":{"rendered":"TARP Inspector General: Same Road, Faster Car"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>On 02.01.10 12:40 PM posted by James Gattuso<\/p>\n<p>\n&lt;ahref=&quot;http:\/\/blog.heritage.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/car-mountain-road100201.jpg&quot;&gt;<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.heritage.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/car-mountain-road100201.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\" \/>&lt;\/p&gt;In an unusually &lt;ahref=&quot;http:\/\/www.sigtarp.gov\/reports\/congress\/2010\/January2010_Quarterly_Report_to_Congress.pdf&quot;&gt;hars  h report released yesterday, the government&#8217;s Special Inspector General for TARP blasted the bailout program, charging that it has not only failed to meet its goals, but that &#8212; absent change &#8212; it may have made things worse.<\/p>\n<p>Among other things, Inspector General Neil Barofsky concluded that because of the bailouts, the market is &#8220;more convinced than ever that the Government will step in as necessary to save significantly significant institutions.&#8221;   This, he says, creates a moral hazard, through what he calls a &#8220;heads I win; tails, the Government bails me out,&#8221; mentality.   The recent extension of TARP for another year only reinforced that moral hazard, by  &#8220;permitting Treasury to maintain a war chest of potential rescue funding&#8230;&#8221;&lt;spanid=&quot;more-25257&quot;&gt;&lt;\/span&gt;<\/p>\n<p>The IG also expressed concern about the housing market, stating that the &#8220;Federal Government&#8217;s concerted efforts to support home prices,&#8221; in part funded by TARP, &#8220;risks re-inflating&#8221; the housing bubble.<\/p>\n<p>In other words, the report concludes: &#8220;&#8230;even if TARP saved our financial system from driving off a cliff back in 2008, absent meaningful reform [which the report does not define], we are still driving on the same winding mountain road, but this time in a faster car.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p> The answer, however, isn&#8217;t more regulation and protection of &#8220;too big to fail&#8221; institutions, as proposed by President Obama.  Instead, policymakers should make failure a more feasible option for all institutions, reducing pressure for bailouts and forcing them to bear the cost of their own actions.    In doing that, a good place to start would be a revised &lt;ahref=&quot;http:\/\/www.heritage.org\/research\/regulation\/bg2343.cfm&quot;&gt;bankruptcy procedure.<\/p>\n<p>Mountain roads are always dangerous.   But by taking dangerous cars off the road, rather than paying for their repair bills, the highway can be made safer for everyone.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.heritage.org\/2010\/02\/01\/tarp-inspector-general-same-road-faster-car\/\" >http:\/\/blog.heritage.org\/2010\/02\/01\/&#8230;ad-faster-car\/<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On 02.01.10 12:40 PM posted by James Gattuso &lt;ahref=&quot;http:\/\/blog.heritage.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/car-mountain-road100201.jpg&quot;&gt;&lt;\/p&gt;In an unusually &lt;ahref=&quot;http:\/\/www.sigtarp.gov\/reports\/congress\/2010\/January2010_Quarterly_Report_to_Congress.pdf&quot;&gt;hars h report released yesterday, the government&#8217;s Special Inspector General for TARP blasted the bailout program, charging that it has not only failed to meet its goals, but that &#8212; absent change &#8212; it may have made things worse. Among other things, Inspector General [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-262699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=262699"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262699\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=262699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=262699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=262699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}