Web Wealth: How bailout money is being spent
Have the bailouts worked? Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars have gone to banks, carmakers, and others. Some is already being paid back. These sites look at how it has been spent.
Have the bailouts worked? Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars have gone to banks, carmakers, and others. Some is already being paid back. These sites look at how it has been spent.
Bailout watch. A cooperative of watchdog groups is behind this site designed to track what's going on with the bailouts. It serves as a clearinghouse with links to federal reports, hearing schedules, news, and background material on, for example, how some financial institutions came to be considered "too big to fail." Core organizations connected to the site are the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Economic Policy Institute, OMB Watch, OpenTheGovernment.org, Project on Government Oversight, and Taxpayers for Common Sense.
Bailout review. U.S. News & World Report blogger Rick Newman asks Barry Ritholtz, author of Bailout Nation, about what has worked and what hasn't. The FDIC takeover of Washington Mutual Inc. a year ago represents the best of the government actions in the crisis, Ritholtz said. Choosing the worst of the bailouts is "a toss-up between Citigroup and AIG," he said.
Report card. According to this "bailout report card" by the Public Interest Research Group, "One of the most disturbing aspects at the outset of the bailout programs was that an enormous group of people did not know what the programs were, how participation was determined, what the money would be used for, what it meant to accept the money, and if it would ever be returned. Did we mention that this group of people included Congress, the American taxpayers, and even the bankers themselves?"
Time.com has its own report card, with appropriate grades, A through F, for various parts of the bailout. The Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bailouts, for example, get a D. The Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, gets a C. And, Hope for Homeowners, a program aimed at stemming foreclosures, but which never did anything of the sort, gets an F.