[remarkEon]

In principle I agree. It remains to be seen how much moral hazard this little excursion into the loan markets by the federal government creates.

One program that doesn't really get much attention in the media (maybe because it was more nuanced and complicated?) was the TALF program [1]. I did a summer internship in 2009 with the Federal Reserve Bank in New York and it really seemed like that program was their primary concern because it was much more directed at the private loan market with targeted loans at "normal" spreads (whatever that meant at the time...) To date, I guess, they've made ~$173m [2]. The design of TALF was wayyy different than TARP, both in scale and objective. At the time I was working on drilling down on the demographic data of who, exactly, was applying for TALF loans. Really interesting stuff.

Not sure we'll be able to actually understand the ramifications for a while.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Term_Asset-Backed_Securities_Lo... [2] http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2013/01/15/treasury-turns-173...