Far be it from me to defend banksters, but…..
The new estimate said the biggest losses will occur from the government’s support of mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. That loss was put at $85 billion followed by a loss of $49 billion from providing help to homeowners facing the threat of losing their homes through foreclosures.
Geithner’s letter estimated that the government would lose $48 billion through the support provided to insurance giant American International Group and another $28 billion would be lost through the billions of dollars in assistance provided to General Motors, Chrysler and their auto financing arms.
The biggest offset to those losses will be earnings of $115 billion that the administration expects the Federal Reserve to realize from the extraordinary assistance it has given to provide liquidity to the financial system.
(bold mine)
Even if you subtract off the $48 billion to AIG (as you should) from the $115 billion, that leaves a $67 billion profit on the bank part of TARP. Now, I don’t know how much of the Fannie and Freddie money in effect went to the banks, so this may be complicated.
But the notion that $600 billion went down the drain on banks is ludicrous and it’s time for that meme (weirdly enough, it’s now mostly a Republican meme) to die.
Brian J
The total cost of the bailout isn’t what bothered me. I’m willing to accept, in theory at least, that we might be required to be a final backstop of the financial industry because we are the only entity large enough to do it. What bothers is that the money was put up while it’s likely that not enough will change.
Ash Can
Hey, we can’t have facts spoiling any good Republican memes, now can we?
DougJ
@Brian J:
FWIW, I even think that, despite the profit, certain parts of TARP stunk to the high heaves.
Lehman creditors got nothing (Lehman debt is worth about 22 cents on the dollar now). AIG creditors were *made whole*. How does that make any sense?
Linda Featheringill
I notice from the commercials that General Motors has paid back their loans, with interest.
1. I am pleasantly surprised as I figured that getting much of that money back was a lost cause.
2. Good for GM! Congratulations!
3. We will have to subtract the GM loans from the amount of money the TARP cost us.
Brian J
@DougJ:
I don’t know how it’s supposed to make sense. Try as I might, I still don’t understand all of what happened, nor what the supposed solutions are supposed to be. In fact, one of the reasons I am excited to go to law school is that I figure I can take a class or three from people who know what they are talking about and then go from there.
mr. whipple
This is another huge victory. At the time there was all sorts of gnashing and wailing on both sides that it was theft and we’d never see a dime back. They were wrong.
Cat Lady
@DougJ:
I’ve read in a few places that Hank Paulson and Dick Fuld hated each other. That’s the only explanation I’ve ever seen that makes the most sense, and then of course making AIG whole made GS whole and then some. Paging Matt Taibbi.
jwb
@DougJ: “How does that make any sense?” Which one being made whole would profit Goldman Sachs? Which one being destroyed would help Goldman Sachs by removing some competition? No doubt, I’m just paranoid.
jwb
@Cat Lady: Mind meld.
Toast
I’ve been fighting the “WE’RE FLUSHING A TRILLION DOLLARS DOWN THE FAT CATS’ TOILETS!!!!!!!1” meme since the day the bailout passed. It’s incredibly annoying how resistant to evidence and ensuing developments it is.
SGEW
@Brian J:
Nobody does.
This sounds hauntingly familiar to me. You’re setting yourself up for disappointment, friend. :(
John Cole
@Linda Featheringill: Not really. GM is still 60% owned by the government.
Brian J
@SGEW:
In what ways? I don’t expect it all to be handed to me, particularly since I doubt any of the classes will focus solely on recent events. I just imagine it’ll be easier to process what I read in the papers because I’ll have the basics down much more than I do now and/or because I will be a better reader.
Glidwrith
With respect to the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bailouts – didn’t they incur a bunch of debt because they were forced to accept a huge chunk of debt from one of the failed banks (Lehman, AIG)?
DougJ
That is certainly what my friends in finance say.
Brian J
@Glidwrith:
I don’t know about that, but if I can throw another (probably wrong) idea out there, how do any losses incurred by taxpayers relate to continued support of Fannie and Freddie as a way to support a very weak economy? Back during the slow news time between Christmas and New Year’s, the administration released the news that it was explicitly backing all of Fannie and Freddie. Paul Krugman made the case that while this might be frustrating, it was necessary because it was one of the ways to prop up the economy as it slowly recovered. It was something the administration could actually do, unlike, say, another stimulus, which probably wasn’t politically possible.
If the answer to my question is that they aren’t related at all, I won’t be surprised, but again, are the losses we will see similar to an indirect stimulus?
SGEW
@Brian J: I was just being snarky about the dominant economic theories that are taught in most law schools (if they’re taught at all! It’s mostly just assumed, and rarely challenged). I’m also pretty cynical about anyone really “knowing” what they’re talking about when it comes to the modern financial system; I kind of feel that it’s like string theory. It’s good math, and (mostly) works out on paper, but nobody can actually comprehensively comprehend what the hell is going on. We’re mostly swinging in the dark, here.
Of course, maybe I just had the wrong professors in law school (Corp Law was the bane of my existence; I nearly gnashed my molars down to stubs by the time it was over). Plus, I’m not very good at teh maths, also, too, so there’s that. ;|
Brian J
@SGEW:
I see.
kay
I just don’t like that the die is cast on Geithner. That bothers me. I think it’s unfair.
If he succeeds at this, will anyone retract or reconsider? We have a comparison: the savings and loan bailout. If he does better than that, adjusting for massiveness, in terms of returns for taxpayers, is anyone going to mention that?
El Cid
What is the best resource on what the Treasury and various Federal Reserves have provided in assistance outside TARP?
JGabriel
SGEW:
Actually, I suspect that there are several economists who do know what the solutions are supposed to be: Stiglitz, Roubini, Krugman, et. al.
It’s just that there are too many bought Senators fighting against implementing them.
.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@John Cole: I was wondering about that, paying back loans versus buying back equity. Also, I assume that GM’s PR dept is drawing a distinction between GM and GMAC, the latter being the corporate cesspool.
Has anyone else heard about lifelong GM buyers refusing to give their business to “Obama Motors”? Somehow helping to make the company profitable again would be playing into the hands of the Kenyan Socialist’s plot to nationalize industry.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
My comment’s in moderation. Is that because I haven’t posted in a while or because I used the phrase “Kenyan Socialist”?
D. Aristophanes
Wait a minute, DougJ. You are leaving out much of the cost of the bailout writ large — it’s not just TARP. It’s free money funneled to the banks through the Fed in many other ways. And the big question, how do you calculate the cost of the recession itself — skyrocketing unemployment, mortgages under water, failing small businesses — against the bailout of a financial sector on the precipice that then turned around and froze lending, exacerbating the downward spiral of Main Street’s economy?
All that said, I agree with Brian J. It really isn’t the cost of the bailout or even where it came from — us taxpaying schlubs — it’s that Obama and Congress do not seem to be doing near enough of what they should to significantly reduce the risk of this happening all over again.
DougJ
Sure, but a lot of the talk has been about “$700 billion down the drain!”. And that’s just not true.
cleek
some things are just too good to be false. so they must be deemed true, for the good of all.
Dean Wormer
But dismissing that meme would require using hotly disputed “math” — just a theory mind you. Reasonable scientists can disagree about it and simply teach the controversy.
D. Aristophanes
Dean Wormer – I think you will find that there is a great deal of disagreement on what the ‘math’ is with regards to the cost of bailing out the financial sector. This is not a simple problem. Just because dumb teabaggers get the answer to the math problem demonstrably wrong, doesn’t mean everybody agrees on what the correct answer is.
Of course the GOP and teabaggers are ridiculous on financial reform. We know that. It’s even helpful to keep pointing it out. But saying the opposition is dumb doesn’t make the current financial reform package smart.
My opinion is that the current reform package isn’t a ‘bailout bill’ as McConnell stupidly characterized it, in the sense that it enshrines future taxpayer bailouts as the law of the land. Rather it does so little to significantly reduce the risk of the overgrown financial sector melting down and bring us all down with it, that when that happens again we will absolutely face a choice of another taxpayer bailout versus economic Armageddon. So in that sense, it is a ‘bailout bill’ as it currently stands. I hope the Congressional leadership makes good on promises to make this inadequate reform better.
D. Aristophanes
To put it another way, I was very opposed to HCR without a public option through last summer. I became gradually swayed that passage of a flawed HCR bill was the right thing to do, thanks to convincing and patient arguments by the likes of DougJ, Cole, Nate Silver et. al., and by early December I was fully on board with ‘pass the bill’.
I haven’t heard much at all from pragmatists supporting this financial reform bill. I’m beginning to hear some things from Krugman and a few others, but there’s been no concerted effort to answer criticisms from Simon Johnston et. al., as near as I can tell.
What I am getting instead is the sense that passing financial reform is more a political consideration than one driven by robust debate leading to the best-possible policy we can carry across the finish line. A sense that some Dems and their supporters are more interested in revisiting the sweet feeling of victory they got from HCR passage than ensuring that financial reform is the very best we can muster.
Brachiator
Great point. But here’s the problem. The TARP bailout was supposed to stabilize the financial system so that these institutions could ramp up lending again throughout the economy and especially to small businesses.
Instead, what has happened is that the major financial institutions used the TARP funds to give themselves a little breathing room and, having had the government relieve them of the pressure caused by their own mistakes, have largely gone back to business as usual. Big deals are getting done, speculative financial instruments are still the backbone of the industry, and huge bonuses are being paid out. Banks and auto companies are eager to pay back the government because it lets them get out from under the reasonable rules imposed upon them (or soc i a list control, if you’re a Republican).
Foreclosures are still are huge problem, and the government is still having to deal with bank closures (and it’s doubly odd that bank failures, which affect local communities as much as Wall Street dealings, don’t get more prominent news coverage).
By any reasonable standard (which automatically excludes the tea bagger POV), the financial industry bailout was worth the risk. However, financial reform and longer term rescue of the economy are still a long way off, and part of the problem here I think is because the Obama Administration is too dependent on Treasury to solve the problem. He has got to get away from the theorists and the macro level economists who focus too much on money and credit policy than on jobs and wages.
Tazistan Jen
Yeah, Fannie and Freddie were forced to swallow a bunch of toxic loans for the good of the system. Blaming them for their losses is convenient but inaccurate.
Brian J., for a while the government backing of Fannie and Freddie was the only thing allowing *any* mortgages to be taken out, so yeah, I agree that it was in part stimulus.
Comrade Luke
The thing I have a problem with is that the banksters made a ton of money through illicit means, and everyone knows this. The SEC is even going after Goldman for it.
And not only was nothing changed, the behavior is raking in profits that the government is bragging about instead of trying to stop.
The government is getting the same dirty money that caused them to bail out the banks in the first place, and everyone is being further conditioned into thinking that since money is being made, it’s ok.
southpaw
It would be very helpful for the upcoming political season if someone put together a comprehensive table of taxpayer outlays in connection with the financial crisis (TARP/CPP, AIG, Fannie/Freddie, Auto companies, etc.) and corresponding returns.
toujoursdan
@John Cole:
They have the same commercial in Canada only with the guy giving metric fuel economy measurements with a southern drawl, which always makes me smile.
The CBC pointed out that the claim isn’t true. GM hasn’t paid off loans from the province of Ontario, etc.
SBW
Exactly how did a 182 billion dollar AIG bailout turn into 48 billion? How exactly is the Federal Reserve going to make 115 billion — selling the 1.25 trillion of MBS they bought? Not in any reasonable time frame.
These figures are accounting games. Reminds me of the original estimates of how much the Iraq war would cost.
Alex S.
In the end, it’s true, TARP was a success. The less than $100 billion to save the banking system was worth it. It’s indeed ironic that the Republicans now oppose it. In the end, their ideology that the government can do nothing right even trumps party affiliation.
HyperIon
I jumped to the end here so apologies if this has already been said…
I feel so cynical about all that is finance-related that I find myself thinking that the government is just another cog in the ripoff machine….so it made a gamble which paid off. Good thing they work for us. They do work for us, right? But it’s still just a big ponzi scheme. Maybe the US government won’t be left holding the bag. Which is a fucked up way to think about it but there you go.
DougJ
@D. Aristophanes:
That’s an interesting point. I don’t know the bill well enough to say if it does enough to prevent future bail-outs.
I will say this, though, the part of the bail-out that the government lost money on was AIG and that was all CDOs. So think that the new CDO regulation will help prevent future bail-outs.
That doesn’t mean the bill does enough and I know the devil is in the details. But I support that part of the bill, in theory, for sure.
DougJ
@SBW:
There are a lot of ways this could have happened. AIG assets/positions could be worth something, so paying $182 billion and getting $134 of assets/positions would, for example, lose you $48 billion.
D. Aristophanes
Here’s a question – if we profited from TARP, why don’t we loan another $800 billion to the biggest banks, financial houses and capital divisions? Hell, why not loan a couple trillion? Anybody interested in doing that?
darms
I dunno what the ‘truth’ is WRT the ultimate cost of these bailouts. But according to the gummint’s own numbers at TreasuryDirect the total federal deficit has increased by $2.2T from 01/20/2009 to 04/25/2010. IMHO that’s a lot of money…
kris
The profits from the bailout are just spin. See:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/08/more-bogus-bailout-reporting-as-big-banks-repay-bailout-money-us-sees-a-profit.html
And here is Dean Baker stating that, yes, the losses run into the hundreds of billions.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dean-baker/did-we-make-a-profit-on-c_b_522624.html
This crisis has been nothing but a transfer of wealth from the ordinary people to the very rich. Very simply put, have any wealthy people of note gone bankrupt from this crisis-not that I know of, but a lot of ordinary people have been.
kay
@southpaw:
ProPublica has a bailout page, with every outlay and every payback. Charts, definitions, the whole works.
AIG were extended a line of credit for 160 billion. They never actually borrowed the full amount.
In addition, as with GM, the government actually took an equity interest in AIG, so that isn’t on the books as a “loan”. AIG was treated less like a bank and more like a car company, if you want to categorize.
AIG had and has valuable assets-the traditional insurance part of the company, as did GM, and the government took an ownership interest in those assets.
The original bail out estimates were predicated on “worst case”.
The max amount any entity could borrow was presented as “the bail out”, which is why we heard such huge numbers. That made sense, for a while, because no one knew if every recipient were going to max the amount available. It makes less and less sense, now, because the worst never actually happened, and there are better “real” numbers.
Corner Stone
@Brian J:
God. You’re still on this?
Corner Stone
It makes it a hell of a lot easier to repay debts when you get them at zero interest and loan them out at 3 to 5 percent more than that.
inthewoods
TARP was a relative success. Fannie and Freddie got $126b that may or may not be paid back. In addition, $1.59 trillion was spent by the Fed getting toxic mortgage-backed securities off the books of the banks – most of which has been marked down by 50% in the Maiden Lane vehicles. That is money that will likely never been seen again. Now that is not, technically, tax payer money, but it is hard to see that printing money to buy MBSs won’t have a huge negative effect on all of the US.
As someone else noticed, propublica has a great page on this:
http://bailout.propublica.org/
They estimate approximately $517b in outflows in total, and that doesn’t take into account the Fed actions on toxic MBSs.
They also have a great page on the overall cost here:
http://www.propublica.org/ion/bailout/item/adding-up-the-financial-rescue-fall-edition-102
As much as I agree that TARP, itself, was a success, it is hard to look at the rest of the numbers and not see a major problem.
kay
@inthewoods:
I’ve been watching the ProPublica page for a while. It’s great.
Commercial media announced 57 different initial figures, in typical he-said-she-said fashion, and then abruptly lost interest. I think the biggest headline was twenty three trillion, which is on its face ridiculous.
It didn’t “work” in twenty minutes, the economy isn’t “all better” so they moved right along.
They’ve spent way more time standing around filming tea partiers screaming about bailouts than following the bailout money. But we’re PRETTY MAD about those bailouts, in theory.
liberal
@kay:
Except that a few months ago there was some talk that the insurance part of the company was woefully undercapitalized. Something about all the units reinsuring each other, in a way that wasn’t good.
liberal
@inthewoods:
This.
liberal
@Corner Stone:
Heh.
There was a page on one of the financia blogs I follow, or linked from one, in which someone did a little bit of digging. They found out that one of the big boys was getting money from the fed at a juicy minus 0.05 percent rate.
liberal
@Corner Stone:
IIRC that’s how Greenspan recapitalized the banks after an earlier banking crisis, maybe very early 1990s.
Makes me wonder why I shouldn’t start a bank…
liberal
@DougJ:
Huh? I thought it was CDSs.
Furthermore, the financial blogs I read seem to say that up until now the reform efforts being looked at in Congress were (at best) very weak tea. There was some movement in the last couple weeks that was in a positive direction, but that’s about it.
Furthermore, of course, as others are pointing out here, the government is losing all sorts of money, or the system as a whole is losing money, in all sorts of ways—an indirect bailout. Fannie/Freddie, all this shite on the Fed’s balance sheet, the Fed handing liquidity to the big boys for essentially no interest, etc etc. Not to mention other shit that can’t end well, like FHA, and so on.
kay
@liberal:
I don’t know, liberal. You tell me. There were frantic calls for the feds to take an equity interest in these entities so they’d have some owner-stake in the company they lent money to. Some control.
They did that, in the case of AIG and GM, and now that’s your problem. I supported the GM bailout. I don’t how I can do that and insist AIG shouldn’t get bailed out. The fact is, I’m not opposed to bail outs. My whole region would have failed had they not bailed out GM. I was all for it.
The reason I follow ProPublica on bailouts is they skip a lot of the motive and just print the numbers. I lost faith in the “blogosphere” reporting process when everyone and their brother were claiming this thing was going to cost twenty three trillion dollars. I know where the number came from. My question is why anyone relied on it.
liberal
@D. Aristophanes:
(I’d add Yves Smith to the list of names that includes Simon J.)
It’s because on the whole they can’t answer the criticisms.
liberal
@DougJ:
Yeah? So you’ve audited the Fed’s books and can tell us the real numbers?
LOL!
liberal
@kay:
There’s an easy answer to that: jobs in the industrial sector depended on the GM bailout. Not true in the case of AIG.
(a) I don’t recall any of the bloggers I read saying that it was going to cost $23T. That kind of number relates to the notional value of derivatives, not a number you’d need to actually prevent implosion.
(b) I haven’t read the ProPublica numbers, but it’s not possible to “just report the numbers” and get a complete picture. It’s a very complicated topic, with lots of interpretation needed. And there are many numbers, such as losses on the Fed’s balance sheet, that cannot be reported directly, because the Fed won’t release them.
liberal
@kay:
Moreover, the question wasn’t simply “bailout AIG?” It was “on what terms? Haircut for the bondholders? What about counterparties (e.g. CDSs)?”
liberal
The biggest cost of the bailout is, of course, not the financial cost. It’s that the bailout was conducted without cramming reform down the throat of the financial sector—that part would come later, which means it won’t really come. The reason that cost is extremely large is, of course, that we have moral hazard all over again, which means a decade or two some version of a shitstorm will happen again, with more damage to the real economy.
Ailuridae
@liberal:
Except the initial bailout to AIG when those decisions were made was not subject to congressional or executive oversight. Here’s the provision used to do so
3. Discounts for Individuals, Partnerships, and Corporations
In unusual and exigent circumstances, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, by the affirmative vote of not less than five members, may authorize any Federal reserve bank, during such periods as the said board may determine, at rates established in accordance with the provisions of section 14, subdivision (d), of this Act, to discount for any individual, partnership, or corporation, notes, drafts, and bills of exchange when such notes, drafts, and bills of exchange are indorsed or otherwise secured to the satisfaction of the Federal Reserve bank: Provided, That before discounting any such note, draft, or bill of exchange for an individual, partnership, or corporation the Federal reserve bank shall obtain evidence that such individual, partnership, or corporation is unable to secure adequate credit accommodations from other banking institutions. All such discounts for individuals, partnerships, or corporations shall be subject to such limitations, restrictions, and regulations as the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System may prescribe.
[12 USC 343. As added by act of July 21, 1932 (47 Stat. 715); and amended by acts of Aug. 23, 1935 (49 Stat. 714) and Dec. 19, 1991 (105 Stat. 2386.
Completely independent of TARP and again, not subject to a vote by anyone. Now this was a strong argument to not reconfirm Bernanke to the Fed Chair and a decent argument to oppose Geithner as Treasury Secretary.
I find it incredible that anyone would argue that the 23 trillion figure wasn’t thrown around on left blogs as the true cost of all of the bailouts. Still Barofsky walked back the claim within a week and admitted that the sum total of absolute downside risk was far lower.
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/07/22/barofsky-debunks-23-trillion/
kay
@liberal:
GM made poor business decisions. They overpay top management. Travel through some of the better Detroit suburbs and tell me what you find.
GM (and Ford and Toyota) has a lending arm that is as irresponsible and reckless as any bank, where people are paying interest over SIX YEARS on a depreciating asset. Auto sales is one of the biggest rip-offs out there. They load people up at dealerships with cars they can’t afford and sell them all sorts of contractual “protections” they don’t need and can’t use. Paying interest on a car loan is a good way to stay in debt in perpetuity.
They bought off unions (with the unions help, because they either got suckered or were in on the scam) with over-priced health insurance for retirees that’s loaded up with cheap freebies, and all those wages that should have gone to current workers went to private health insurers.
Auto manufacturers and sellers do all that, liberal. It isn’t all the noble workman swinging a hammer.
I supported that bail out. So you see my problem. If I want to be consistent, and I do.
inthewoods
@liberal:
Was that “This” supposed to be a link? :)
kay
@liberal:
Go to any car dealership, and ask around, or just glance at a contract for purchase of a new car. Look at what some 22 year old signs, at the dealership. The “F and I Guy” is a huge profit center.
Financing and Insurance.
That’s who we were bailing out when we bailed out car companies. I supported it, but I knew what I was supporting.