Tag Archives: TARP

Members of the House Financial Services Committee are advocating for the termination of federal foreclosure relief programs largely based on the argument that their cost outweighs the benefits. Committee members are scheduled to vote on bills ending the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) and HUD's Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) on Wednesday. Information provided by the Congressional Research Service indicates that the price tag for the government's foreclosure mitigation programs will come in well below earlier estimates.

Washington's guard dog who's watched vigilantly over the handling of the federal government's $700 billion bailout purse will step down from his post on March 30. Neil Barofsky, special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP), told President Obama that with his initial goals as the program overseer met, ""it is the right time for me to step down and pursue other opportunities.""

On Wednesday a House subcommittee held a hearing to examine private sector involvement in the housing market, in order to determine if the high amount of government participation is a hindrance to the sector's recovery. Rep. Judy Biggert, subcommittee chair, said government intervention in the housing market reached record levels during the financial crisis, resulting in a cost to taxpayers of hundreds of billions of dollars. The hearing examined options for removing barriers to private investment in the housing market.

In more bad news for the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), three congressmen, Reps. Jim Jordan, Patrick McHenry, and Darrell Issa have proposed a bill to end the program. Issa is chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee and introduced the bill at the committee's first hearing last week. HAMP took a beating at the hearing from the lawmakers. They called the program a ""colossal failure"" and said it's just one more example of why government interference in the private sector doesn't work.

The U.S. Treasury Department says the government's bailout of the nation's banking system is ""nearing profitability."" Total repayments and other income from Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) initiatives that provided direct financial support to banks now comes to $243 billion, very near surpassing total disbursements under those programs of $245 billion. Treasury says the lifetime cost of TARP is primarily concentrated within funds disbursed for foreclosure prevention programs.

Last week, the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, released a report to Congress saying servicers are not doing all they can to help facilitate the process of keeping borrowers in their homes. To date there have been 1,025,907 homeowners rejected for HAMP modifications by the eight largest servicers, and there have been 572,655 canceled trial modifications, which typically occurs because of insufficient documentation, program ineligibility, or because the borrower missed payments.

In his report to Congress this week, Neil Barofsky covered a number of controversial issues surrounding the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) designed by Treasury as a foreclosure prevention effort. Barofsky says HAMP ""continues to fall dramatically short of any meaningful standard of success,"" and he faults servicers for compounding the program's problems with unnecessary delays and mishandling of paperwork. Barofsky is the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which funds the HAMP initiative.

The passing of the Dodd-Frank Reform Act last summer was hailed as the end of ""too-big-to-fail"" and the end of corporate bailouts. But in a report to be presented to Congress Wednesday, Neil Barofsky, head of the group charged with overseeing the government's handling of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) says the ""too-big-to-fail"" problem has not been solved; in fact, it's gotten worse, thanks to implicit guarantees that came with the massive bailouts of companies such as Citigroup, AIG, and Bank of America.

The Obama administration's signature foreclosure prevention program will help only 700,000 Americans save their homes, according to a scathing report released Tuesday by the Congressional Oversight Panel. The group's assessment falls far short of the 3 to 4 million homeowners that the president pledged would receive more sustainable mortgage loans when the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) was launched in March of last year, and is well below the 8 to 13 million foreclosures expected by 2012.

The U.S. Treasury Department has priced a public offering of its remaining 2.4 billion shares of Citigroup Inc. common stock at $4.35 per share, bringing the government's ownership of the nation's third largest bank to an end. The deal should yield about $10.5 billion. Treasury expects to reap total proceeds of $57 billion from its $45 billion investment in Citigroup, netting a tidy $12 billion profit for taxpayers for the bank's bailout. The total amount of TARP funds returned to taxpayers now exceeds $261 billion.