Fox Guarding the Hen House

Typical Bush Administration crookery.

Last week, Congress's oversight panel for the TARP funds confirmed in a report that the Treasury Department essentially has no idea what banks have done with the astronomical sums they've been handed.

  TPM

Oh, I think they have a good guess. That was the point, wasn't it? I mean, if they wanted to know what was happening, they couldn’t have attached strings to the money? A contract spelling it out, maybe? No, this is one of the last of the Bush moves whereby they take your tax dollars and funnel them into their own pockets and those of their cronies and supporters.

Given lack of this information, we figured it might at least be helpful to know a bit about a few of the people at Treasury who are in charge of administering the massive program, and what their backgrounds might tell us about the way they've gone about it.

As the New York Times reported back in October, many of those people are former execs at Goldman Sachs [ed: one of the firms being bailed out], the Wall Street behemoth that used to be led by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

Most prominent among those is Neel Kashkari, the 35-year old former Goldman VP who was appointed by Paulson in October as the interim head of the Office of Financial Stability (OFS), which is in charge of implementing the bailout. Kashkari's role is said by the Times to have "evolved" after Paulson changed the original bailout plan, so that Treasury would invest money directly in troubled banks.

But less attention has been paid to another Goldman alum, Kendrick Wilson, who was brought in -- after a personal call from his old Harvard Business School buddy, George W. Bush -- to advise Paulson on how to fix the financial markets.

[...]

And overseeing Treasury's public response to the crisis has been Michele Davis,
a former "senior vice president of regulatory policy," in other words, a lobbyist, for Fannie Mae -- the troubled mortgage giant whose collapse helped precipitate the crisis.

How surprising!

Read it all. There are more players. The people in charge of the bailout money are among the people who created the need for the bailout. How very quaint.

And Senator Levin had to threaten to subpoena Treasury to get to see the bailout contracts!

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Update: Levin could only get the contracts if he promised not to make them public!?