Tattling on TARP

Where are billions in taxpayer dollars intended for the financial services bailout actually going? A new report says we shouldn't be looking at the Treasury Department for answers.

The report comes from a five-member, bipartisan, congressional oversight panel tasked with keeping tabs on the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. The panel knocked Treasury for its apparent inability to track TARP dollars, and it criticized the department's handling of the nation's housing foreclosure crisis. None of the TARP funds have been used to help troubled mortgage holders.

"Treasury needs to be clear as to what, if anything, it has done, and if it insists on taking credit for private sector efforts, it must explain what 'help' means," the draft report said, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The head of the panel, Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren, took to the morning TV talk shows to explain.

"I'm shocked that we have to ask these questions," Warren said on ABC's Good Morning America, "but what I will say is that I'm not giving up on this. The best news is that these questions have gotten a lot of attention and a lot of people are demanding answers and when a lot of people demand answers, things start to change."

Warren said that Treasury simply wasn't tracking what was happening with the money. "They didn't tell the banks what they had to do in order to get the money. It might be used for lending, it might be used to buy other banks ... Or it might just be stuffed in vaults and left there," she said.

"I think that Congress may want to take a very hard look at that question," she added. "Ultimately, we don't have a badge, don't have a gun. It's up to Congress."

by J. Jennings Moss