No New Oversight in TARP Round Two

Granting the Obama administration the second $350 billion of Wall Street bailout funding does nothing to ensure that the money is spent wisely, some of the nation’s top economists told Senate lawmakers Thursday. Without stricter conditions on banks and concrete assurance that the money will target foreclosure mitigation, the experts warned, the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) will do little to revive the ailing economy.

“It’s a never-ending sinkhole of taxpayer money into major financial institutions without [attaching] some major strings,” Allen Sinai, chief global economist at Decision Economics, a private consulting firm, told lawmakers on the Senate Budget Committee Thursday. “[TARP] is the status quo,” he added later. “I wouldn’t support that.”