President Obama has proposed using $30 billion in TARP funds for loans to small businesses. As the Wall Street Journal points out, this is a drop in the bucket.
The $30 billion in Troubled Asset Relief Program funds targeted by Mr. Obama represent about 4.3% of the $700 billion in small-business loans held by U.S. banks and savings institutions, according to the Treasury Department. As of November, the 22 largest banks that got capital infusions through TARP had $257 billion in small-business loans, the Treasury said.
This meager public funding is meant to create save or create small business jobs. Another Exercise In Futility. Let's take a brief look at where the TARP money stood in December, 2009. These charts are from the Treasury's TARP Monthly 105(a) Report.
Losses in December stood at $209.44 billion, with the biggest losers being the Capital Purchase Program (bank bailouts), AIG (bank bailouts to CDS counterparties), and the Auto Industry Financing Program (auto industry bailouts. Shouldn't there be a TV program called The Biggest Loser? And of course there is! It's on NBC. It's unlikely that anybody from AIG or General Motors will ever appear on it. Too bad.
No, we don't ridicule overpaid CEOs for screwing up. These well-connected suits get rewarded for their failures. We ridicule fat people instead. Watch this, it's really, really sad.
YouTube gave me a MacDonalds ad to watch before the video. Now there's some healthy food. Nobody ever got fat eating at MacDonalds, right? Abusing obese people passes for entertainment during the waning days of the Empire.
This is what you get when you let corporations run The State.
I'm just hopelessly out of touch. The most discouraging thing about looking through People Magazine in the grocery store check-out line is that I have no clue who most of the beautiful people I'm looking at actually are. And why are they in People Magazine? Generally, I just file them under Beautiful Person of Unknown Provenance.
Anyway, the $30 billion for small businesses is also a drop in the bucket in TarpLand. I should also mention that Obama has announced plans for a new fee to collect up to $120 billion in lost TARP money from the banks.
The Obama administration official said the amount of money raised from the fees would not exceed $120 billion since this was the higher end of conservative estimates of the cost of the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP.
U.S. Treasury officials expect TARP losses to be much lower than that sum, and over the course of years the fee will pay back any costs of the $700 billion taxpayer bailout, the administration official said.
Adding up the auto bailouts and AIG bank bailouts, that's $121.73 billion right there. How much will the ultimate TARP losses be? At most $120 billion says the Obama administration.
Who's going to be The Real Biggest Loser? My money is on AIG.
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