Feb 10, 2009

TARP indigestion

Some banks have had a hard time with their taxpayer chemotherapy treatments and say they want to stop. From the New York Times:
Wall Street banks have taken billions of taxpayer dollars. Now some of them are starting to wonder if they should give the money back.

Even before the government announced its latest efforts to fix the troubled banking industry on Tuesday, executives at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley said they wanted to repay the money quickly. Both banks received $10 billion under the first rescue plan last fall.

-snip-

“We just think that operating our business without the government capital would be an easier thing to do,” said David A. Viniar, the chief financial officer of Goldman. “We’d be under less scrutiny, and under less pressure. Not that we’d be out of the public eye; we’re still going to be in the public eye.”
It's good they're feeling so healthy again, right?

Also, shouldn't we take some comfort in the fact that the Dow dropped today after Treasurer Timothy Geithner laid out TARP II? Like, maybe stockholders are coming to grips with the reality that the government can't make their broken eggs whole again.

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