While everyone crows that the revised bailout bill contains accountability and oversight, a closer examination of the text reveals otherwise:
From page 85 of the draft bill:
Section 129 (c): "The information submitted to Congress under this section may be kept confidential, upon the written request of the Chairman of the Board, in which case it shall be made available only to the Chairpersons and ranking members of the Committees described in subsection (a).
The Chairman of the Board is Ben Bernanke. Upon Bernanke's written request, any bailout action would be kept secret to the public. As there are no standards or protocols that outline when Bernanke can write his confidentiality letter, you can be damn certain he's going to be writing a lot of letters. There simply won't be any way for the public to know where our tax dollars are being sent.
But even if we had a clear accounting of all the bailout transactions, do you really think a purchase would be reversed? If company X sold $2 million of crap mortgage backed securities to the Fed for $25 million (using accounting based on whatever replaces the mark to market rules that are in the process of being modified today) on December 1 and the public learned of it on January 10, what would be the mechanism for recovering the money? In all likelihood, that money will be gone, sent off to other firms to make good on debt or perhaps squirreled away in some Swiss bank account. The reality is that once the Fed purchases an asset, there's very little anyone can do to reverse the purchase. Poof, that money will be gone.