Today’s TARP hearing at Senate Banking follows a slew of recent reports. The Congressional Oversight Panel (COP) issued its final report yesterday. Economists Simon Johnson, Allan Meltzer, Joe Stiglitz, and Luigi Zinglales submitted testimony to COP two weeks ago. The Special Inspector General for TARP (SIGTARP) issued a comprehensive review in January. Three members of COP published an oped in today’s Wall Street Journal.
A common theme is the high cost of the TARP. I‘m not talking about whether the government lost or made money, which is not a good measure of effectiveness, but rather the costs to the economy (stability, growth, employment, etc). Since November 2008 I have been writing about the costs of the chaotic rollout of the TARP which in my view worsened the crisis and exacerbated the panic. (Here is my written testimony for today’s hearing.) In his recent book former FDIC chairman Bill Isaac concluded that “any objective analysis would conclude that the TARP legislation did nothing to stabilize the financial system that could not have been done without it. Moreover, the negative aspects of the TARP legislation far outweighed any possible benefit.” In his recent testimony Joe Stiglitz said that “TARP has not only been a dismal failure…but the way the program was managed has, I believe, contributed to the economy’s problems.”
