September 25, 2009, Would be funny if funny department
Via digby, we learn from this HuffPo piece about the thoughts of Neil Barofsky, the Treasury Department's man in charge of the Troubled Assets Recovery Program (TARP). You all remember TARP, the much vaunted program by which quite literally all the money in the world was sucked out of possible productive uses to prop up our successful financial system, so that necessary reforms wouldn't be implemented, we could have "business as usual," and so that the banking sector, whose problem was the concentration of insanely high market share in a few institutions, would end up being consolidated into even fewer, larger institutions, even more too big to fail. As Mr.Barofsky, our TARP chief tells it, just a year after the collapse of Lehman Bros. presaged a systemic meltdown... which was duly temporarily staved off by a massive injection of trillions of dollars that will have to eventually be siphoned from somewhere (that's us, folks... "the rubes")... anyway, Mr. Barofsky tells us that the banking system is actually shakier than it was a year ago.
WTF?
Eh... I wouldn't worry too much... it's all just money. Hey, you have your health, right?