Where Is the Bailout Money Going?

I think this piece sums up the outrageous state of affairs pretty well:

In the meantime, the massacre in financial markets and among financial firms is continuing. The debate on “bank nationalization” is borderline surreal, with the U.S. government having already committed–between guarantees, investment, recapitalization and liquidity provision–about $9 trillion of government financial resources to the financial system (and having already spent $2 trillion of this staggering $9 trillion figure).

Thus, the U.S. financial system is de facto nationalized, as the Federal Reserve has become the lender of first and only resort rather than the lender of last resort, and the U.S. Treasury is the spender and guarantor of first and only resort. The only issue is whether banks and financial institutions should also be nationalized de jure.

. . . AIG, which lost $62 billion in the fourth quarter and $99 billion in all of 2008 and is already 80% government-owned. With such staggering losses, it should be formally 100% government-owned. And now the Fed and Treasury commitments of public resources to the bailout of the shareholders and creditors of AIG have gone from $80 billion to $162 billion.

(snip)

This is all taxpayer money that's being spent, it all comes from the same pot --- and as far as I know it may even be necessary spending. But they are hiding the names of the recipients of potentially 9 trillion dollars and when it does slip out who some of them are, it turns out --- again --- that it's same people who perpetrated this crisis. Meanwhile, all day long, I'm watching simpleminded "fleecing of America" stories with some gasbag busybodies looking down their noses at some schmuck who was told that he should lie on the mortgage application for his monstrous tract home in Riverside and has lost everything. Everybody's lecturing everybody else about responsibility. And yet we have trillions going unaccounted for at the Fed and they seem to believe there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Something is rotten at the Fed and treasury --- or, at least, it sure smells that way. Maybe nobody would notice the rather shocking lack of transparency if what they were doing was actually working. But it isn't. The system is still in crisis and it's not getting any better.