A sales consultant at Superior Pontiac-Buick-GMC-Nissan dealership in Dearborn, Mich.
Congress is fighting with both the administration that is leaving and the one that is coming about what should happen to the $350 billion left in the TARP. Most legislators do not seem to be happy about how Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson spent the first $350 billion. Too much of it got invested in banks and car companies. Not enough went to help mortgage holders.
Whether it is practical to help people with troubled home loans one-by-one may be besides the point. The fight over the TARP will be vicious. Saying that taxpayers will get their money back by saving the housing market probably creates good political capital. (See pictures of the global financial crisis.)
The TARP may simply disappear before the eyes of everyone debating how it should be used. Bank of America (BAC) is negotiating with the government for billions and billions of dollars to close its acquisition of Merrill Lynch. That was not how it was supposed to work. BAC was supposed to have had the balance sheet to suck up both Merrill and Countrywide.
Sitting on the government's side of the table in the talks with Bank of America are officials from Treasury, the Fed, and the FDIC. The deposit insurance agency does not have to capital to bail out a lot of big banks. It has to worry about work-outs for smaller ones that are failing. The Fed is willing to lend big banks money for a short term. It is not likely to get into the business of trading cash for equity.
The Treasury has already been through a round of throwing money at financial firms in exchange for equity and the possible right of making sure bank executives get the salaries they deserve rather than the ones their boards give them.
Once Congress does go along with letting Obama's Treasury Secretary have access to the $350 billion still left from the money that was allocated for the TARP, a great deal of it may be going right back out to banks. The forecast now is that Citigroup (C) could lose $10 billion this quarter. A look at what is happening to consumer credit, LBOs, and the alarming increase in corporate bankruptcies means that Citi may need more than one injection of capital this year. The same holds true for Bank of America and a number of other financial firms which have not yet telegraphed their Q4 numbers.
The fight over the use of the TARP funds may be academic, at least in part. The money has already been spent.
— Douglas A. McIntyre
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