[dmix]

The "black budget" is probably a monster of waste and graft. We're lucky we even get to see how much Palantir is getting.

Reminds me of this old article about TARP I was reading recently. They loaned out $700B to a select few companies, many who were former employers of cabinet and treasury members. And they weren't even required to tell the public what they did with it:

> They’d decided not to even ask banks to monitor what they did with the bailout money [..] Instead of lending their new cash to struggling homeowners and small businesses, as Summers had promised, the banks were literally sitting on it. [..] From the start, taxpayer money was used to subsidize a string of finance mergers, from the Chase-Bear Stearns deal to the Wells Fargo­ Wachovia merger to Bank of America’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch.

> Congress had approved $700 billion to buy up toxic mortgages, but $250 billion of the money was now shifted to direct capital injections for banks.

Only $4 out of $700 billion ended up going to help home owners directly, the other $696B went to Wall St, even though it only passed congress because it was sold as helping the home owners:

> In fact, the amount of money that eventually got spent on homeowner aid now stands as a kind of grotesque joke compared to the Himalayan mountain range of cash that got moved onto the balance sheets of the big banks more or less instantly in the first months of the bailouts. At the start, $50 billion of TARP funds were earmarked for HAMP. In 2010, the size of the program was cut to $30 billion. As of November of last year, a mere $4 billion total has been spent for loan modifications and other homeowner aid.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/secrets-...

It's always a great time to have friends in government, but even more so in recent years. Especially the way Trump has only increased spending, just like Obama and Bush did. Likewise public/private partnerships and investments directly into private firms have increased in numbers, particularly in defence.

[nickles]

> They "loaned" out $700B to a select few companies, many who were former employers of cabinet and treasury members. Only $4 out of $700 billion ended up going to help home owners directly, the other $696B went to Wall St

This is false. As of Feb 2019, the government earned $107 billion in profit on TARP. Your source is 6 years old and out of date.

Additionally, funds were not loaned exclusively to financial companies. Automobile companies received ~$60B in TARP, which has netted a loss of approximately $12B for taxpayers.

[0] https://projects.propublica.org/bailout

[1] https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/list/index

[dmix]

Palantir wasn't "given" $1.5 billion either. What's your point?

The TARP article explains how they ended up being almost entirely loans directly to banks and others - which wasn't the original plan when sold to congress, only part it was supposed to be loaned.

The article also mentioned how much they are making off of it as a result of the banks doing a whole bunch of stuff that had little to do with "toxic mortgages" or helping the "little guy" (small business loans and home ownership), again as it was sold to Congress, where it was rushed through with little scrutiny and then administered by a man called a "stooge" for the banks.

The fact they made their money back and a few banks got richer, while the market only got further reduced to a smaller group of bigger banks, wasn't the point. It's the disconnect between why they got the money and how it was sold to congress and the public, and how it went to a well connected select few.

It's funny how everyone thinks all the dirty details are insignificant now that the mega banks paid it back with interest. Which was always the plan for the actual loans part - that were supposed to have strings attached so it was used for mortgages and small business loans. The original plan also involved buying up a whole bunch of the toxic debt directly... but that of course was quickly dropped and it all went to no-strings-attached loans. Which I highly doubt congress or the public would agree to, even with $100B ROI.

Nothing to see here, I guess?

[jedberg]

$636B was actually loaned out, and so far $740B has come back to the Treasury in interest and principle. The US government made money on TARP.

https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/

[dmix]

mhm, everyone posts this reply whenever it comes up now as if that was the whole point of TARP was to make some money off mega-banks and car companies.

Subsidizing monopolies and financing M&As which further reduce competition is always a safe bet if your goal is making money. Especially in a down market when no one else has your special access to cheap capital... you can make a killing and help your buddies from private school get the bulk of it. Why doesn't the gov always do that?!

If the public asks questions just show them the sweet 10% interest the government got back. Who cares about moral hazards, long term stability, opportunity costs, lack of competition, oversight, and people lying to congress. We're now $100b richer(?), at least in the short term!

[wahern]

Because the financial crisis wasn't caused by mortgages, it was caused by highly leveraged derivatives packaging those mortgages. But for the derivatives, all we would have seen was a humdrum correction in the mortgage market, possibly without any recession at all.

TARP was principally used to buy those derivatives to shore up the financial system. If it was used to buy mortgages directly it would have required orders of magnitude more money (you couldn't just buy out subprime because the entire market had seized up), and it couldn't have been executed quickly enough to forestall further collapse of the system.

The reason only a handful of entities saw substantial TARP money is precisely because those were the entities at the most critical positions in the system. And the fact that they were so critical and important would have obvious correlations (both nefarious and benign) with their political and bureaucratic ties.

Yes, it was unfair, but the unfairness wasn't with TARP but with the financial system TARP was shoring up. If all we cared about was some superficial notion of fairness we could have simply allowed the entire CDO mortgage market to collapse, taking the rest of the financial system down with it. Indeed, many people at the time argued for precisely that.

If people want to be indignant, be indignant at the limited scope of the subsequent reforms, and be especially indignant at the silent deconstruction of those reforms.

[rubyn00bie]

I hope this comes off friendly...

> Only $4 out of $700 billion ended up going to help home owners directly, the other $696B went to Wall St (even though it only passed congress because it was sold as helping the home owners)

TARP bailouts did suck but were also necessary to fend off complete economic collapse [1] of western capitalism... The banks that received the money either didn't need it all because the US government proved to the world the dollar was safe, or they desperately needed it as markets swan dived into the ground and collapsed (which we didn't see)... Quantitative Easing (QE) was necessary as were the monetary policies (low interest rates) to stabilize the economy. It really wasn't allowed to be about healing, it was only ever triage to keep it (the economy) alive.

Unfortunately, the US public didn't get bailed out, and we didn't throw the motherfuckers in jail... so we accomplished very little, but we did keep the world economy afloat. The real problem at the time for appropriate bailouts was political, congress wouldn't allocate more. People by and large do not understand macroeconomics, and that's likely, I believe, because they don't understand large numbers (this might sound silly or rude, but it's just fundamental and not a flippant or derogatory comment).

... with all that said, I totally agree that Trump is increasing spending... Like all republicans do, and to to be clear it's factually republican party who increase our deficits by-and-large through tax cuts [2] which don't grow the fucking economy because trickle down is bullshit. And anyone who wants to say the deficit went up by a ton because of the Obama administration keep in mind two things, please:

1.) TARP bailouts, and all that bullshit were a Bush problem. 2.) Most of the Iraq/Afghanistan war budget was paid for from appropriations by congress which didn't start hitting the books until 2009 (when Obama took office).

I didn't much care for Obama as he was too much of a centrist, but I do believe in trying to present an accurate picture of what happened and why that happened.

[1] I've always been on the fence if the collapse of Keynesian economics (and monetary policy when applicable) would be good for my inner anarcho-syndicalist... I tend to think it's better in steps, but maybe that's not possible; nor, I suppose is it relevant to this conversation...

[2] Don't think I'm trying to solely blame Republicans for our fucked up economy, neoconservative liberal policies from democrats like Slick Willy did a number too... Like letting Glass-Steagall get repealed.