Sunday, January 31, 2010

77 Fraud, Money Laundering, Insider Trading, and Tax Evasion Investigations Underway Regarding TARP

Inquiring minds are reading the SIGTARP Quarterly Report To Congress. http://www.sigtarp.gov/reports/congress ... ngress.pdf The report is a massive 224 pages long. I will do my best to condense it down to the critical highlights involving Fraud, Money Laundering, Insider Trading, etc.

Let's start with the SIGTARP mission, then the findings.

Mission

SIGTARP’s mission is to advance economic stability by promoting the efficiency and effectiveness of TARP management, through transparency, through coordinated oversight, and through robust enforcement against those, whether inside or outside of Government, who waste, steal or abuse TARP funds.

Let's dive into the 224 page report and see how well TARP, and the alphabet soup of lending facilities met their stated goals.

On the positive side, there are clear signs that aspects of the financial system are far more stable than they were at the height of the crisis in the fall of 2008. Many large banks have once again been able to raise funds in the capital markets, and some institutions — including some that appeared to be on the verge of collapse — have recovered sufficiently to repay their TARP investments years earlier than most would have predicted. These repayments and the sales of the warrants associated with them have meant that Treasury (and thus the taxpayer) has turned a profit on some of the individual TARP investments; as a result of these repayments, among other positive developments, it now appears that the ultimate cost of TARP to the American taxpayer, while still substantial, might be significantly less than initially estimated.

Mish: The idea that there are "profits" is fictitious. It's gffectivly praising making 10 cents on a dollar while not counting hundreds of $billions lost on AIG and Fannie Mae, and ignoring $300 billion worth of loan guarantees at Citigroup still in effect.

Moreover, the only reason banks were able to show a profit and pay back TARP loans is mark-to-market rules were delayed further and banks did not have to bring hundreds of billions of dollars in off balance sheet SIVs back on to bank balance sheets.

Many of TARP’s stated goals, however, have simply not been met. Despite the fact that the explicit goal of the Capital Purchase Program (“CPPâ€