Here's how they spent your first TARP - Bailout Is a Windfall to Banks, if Not to Borrowers:
At the Palm Beach Ritz-Carlton last November, John C. Hope III, the chairman of Whitney National Bank in New Orleans, stood before a ballroom full of Wall Street analysts and explained how his bank intended to use its $300 million in federal bailout money.
"Make more loans?" Mr. Hope said. "We’re not going to change our business model or our credit policies to accommodate the needs of the public sector as they see it to have us make more loans."
At least this guy had the decency to come clean. And now we are seriously considering a second tranche of TARP?
Here's another great use of TARP funding:
Despite crippling losses, multibillion-dollar bailouts and the passing of some of the most prominent names in the business, employees at financial companies in New York, the now-diminished world capital of capital, collected an estimated $18.4 billion in bonuses for the year.
All the bankers know they have bankrupted their banks and are now sucking the last drops of blood from their rotting corpses. Here's Nuriel Roubini, who predicted this collapse last year:
"I’ve found that credit losses could peak at a level of $3.6 trillion for U.S. institutions, half of them by banks and broker dealers," Roubini said at a conference in Dubai today. "If that’s true, it means the U.S. banking system is effectively insolvent because it starts with a capital of $1.4 trillion. This is a systemic banking crisis."
And now they are planning a second TARP:
Government officials seeking to revamp the U.S. financial bailout have discussed spending another $1 trillion to $2 trillion to help restore banks to health, according to people familiar with the matter.
Aiyyaaa! Stop me before I TARP again!