Article • Dean Baker’s Beat the Press
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The TARP is one of those issues like Social Security, where the Washington Post has displayed considerably less diversity in opinions than Pravda back in the days of the Soviet Union. Just in case you hadn’t seen their TARP is great line enough, the Post invited Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to invent some myths that he could attack in the Outlook section.
Readers were no doubt looking for the line about how TARP and related bailouts used trillions of dollars of loans and loan guarantees from the Treasury, Fed, and FDIC to keep the largest financial institutions from going into bankruptcy, protecting the wealth of their shareholders, many of their creditors and top executives. But of course that is not a myth.