Bailout

Neil Barofsky, the Inspector General of the TARP bailout program from 2008 until 2011, has a must-read new book entitled Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street. When he was serving as IG, I praised Barofsky’s independence and adversarial watchdog mentality several times when he was warning of the Treasury Department and Tim Geithner’s overarching devotion to the interests of Wall Street at the expense of everyone else. But this new book lays out the case as clearly and powerfully as it can be made that the Obama administration and Geithner, as The New York Times‘ Gretchen Morgenson put it, “eagerly served Wall Street interests at the public’s expense, and regulators were captured by the very industry they were supposed to be regulating.”

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Barofsky is as well-positioned as it gets to describe the priorities and loyalties of the economic policymakers inside the administration, and is one of the very few Washington officials with the independence and courage to do so. Unsurprisingly, his book presents the definitive case for how the Obama administration devoted itself to the interests of the very plutocrats who precipitated the financial crisis in the first place.

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As one very good review of the book began: “I sincerely did not think it would be possible at this point to lower my opinion of Tim Geithner. Nor did I think it possible, after the year and a half I just spent there, to make me think less of DC. . . . [F]ormer TARP watchdog Neil Barofsky has accomplished both with his just-published book Bailout.” Barofsky has been particularly critical of the Treasury Department’s failure to use the billions in funds allocated by Congress to help distressed homeowners as part of the HAMP program, on the ground that bankers — rather than ordinary Americans — were their only real concern (MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, citing this New York Times article on the administration’s HAMP failures, previously said that the “[White House's] foreclosure mitigation failure has been so egregious and cruel, it makes me question their motives on everything”).

Predictably, Barofsky, a life-long Democrat and 2008 Obama supporter, has now become a Prime Enemy of Democratic partisans and banker-loyal, establishment-protecting, status-quo-perpetuating apparatchiks.
  Glenn Greenwald