November 30, 2010
A new report from the Congressional Budget Office prompted another round of celebrations in the media over how little the program cost taxpayers. In fact, the program kept the major Wall Street banks in business preserving trillions of dollars in paper wealth for stockholders, bondholders, and top executives at these institutions.
The situation can be compared to one in which the government prints up a trillion dollars and hands it to the Wall Street gang. Since the money was just printed, it does not require any tax revenue. Nonetheless, this transfer will be a burden on all non-Wall Street types in future years, since the Wall Street crew will have a claim on society’s resources that they would not otherwise have.
In the case of the TARP and related Fed and FDIC programs, the government made trillions of dollars in loans and loan guarantees available to the banks at far below market rates. This allowed them to survive in a situation where they would have gone under if the market had been left to work its magic. The fact that Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and the rest still exist and its top executives are hugely wealthy is a direct result of the taxpayers’ generosity.
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