99% of TARP has been repaid already. That's more than you can say about regular people paying back their credit card debts due to limitless spending.
Furthermore, TARP being repaid is not an inherently good thing. Who cares whether we got the bailout money back if the system is still completely broken? We're still in a situation where those banks can do whatever they want, and when things collapse the government will have no choice but to bail them out again because the alternatives are unacceptable. Now that the banks don't owe the government TARP money it has even less leverage than it might have had before.
You say Banks, which part of the Banks? You can't lump the whole Banking system into one group and blame it all. Also the top 1% encompasses much more than these 'greed fuelled' bankers on Wall Street.
The paper argued that certain things - like the cost of housing (due to rising prices) and health care - were the cause of middle-class debt loads, and that consumption on frivolous items was actually down from the 1970s.
This is a plausible argument. The cost of housing, health care, and education has certainly skyrocketed. What Warren doesn't mention, though, is that all of these areas are heavily regulated and subsidized by the federal government - unlike all the areas where middle-class consumption has declined.
You might be able to persuade me that people are in fact spending responsibly, but you'll have a harder time persuading me that the solution to their problems is more regulations, or that the appropriate target of these protestors is anywhere outside Washington DC.
That would be you.
We loaned citibank $25bn with TARP. They paid that back. You seem to think that thats the end of the story. Thanks for telling us what we should read.
Turns out we also guaranteed losses on $300bn of assets, added an additional $20bn, and a further credit line of $45bn.
From were I'm standing, that should mean we own citibank. If my company was in that situation, you think investors would offer me a loan? You think that's gonna be the deal you get next time your company is in trouble?
We should own it, dismantle it, break it up. Do that for every big bank down the line.
But forget the $350bn. You think that if your business needs $25bn or it goes under tomorrow, that one of these rich people will just loan you $25bn and let you pay it back when you can? LOL. In my world, $25bn bought citibank outright, and we overpaid. Instead we got 36%. Joke.
Two sets of rules. One for them. One for us.
Blame the government for that, not Wall Street. Also how much of Apple's 70 billion or so in cash flows through to the economy?
