Originally posted by: DaveSimmons
Originally posted by: PC Surgeon
Originally posted by: DaveSimmons
(with the names and some details obscured to prevent retaliation). Under the Bush team a prominent and profitable bank, under threat of a damaging public audit, was forced to accept less than $1 billion of TARP money.
Ignoring the hearsay aspect of this where nothing is verifiable, the "consequences" are probably the public audit that would show who knows how many violations. If they were scared enough of an audit to take the TARP money and give the govenrment control they probably have a lot to hide.
So whats the excuse for not accepting repayment?
There are no real facts in the OP, but assuming it's not made up,
who is saying they can't repay? They just (apparently) want to repay while ducking the audit that would reveal their violations and possibly fraud.
Re bolded section - the Treasury under geithner.
At this point in time the TARP funds cannot be repaid without Treasury permission.
Subsequent to accepting TARP funds, the gov has added many 'strings' giving it ever increasing authority over banks.
Unless you've not been following financial news, not even remotely, as the strings have been added more and more banks have stepped forward saying they 'strongly encouraged' to accept TARP funds they didn't need at the time. Now they wanna pay it back and have submitted request for permission to do so. They haven't gotten that permission and most industry watchers doent think they'll get it this year either.
As regards audits, I'm pretty sure part of the process of requesting to return the TARP money is a governemnt audit, i.e., they are asking for an audit.
Fear of a gov audit back then isn't fear of an audit in general, hoping 'bad stuff' won't be found. These banks are audited constantly, they have teams of internal auditors and external auditors like other publically traded companies do. They are required to issue audited quarterly and annual financial statements under SEC rules.
So the audit threatened would have been a 'special audit'. What do those do? They cause people to suspect your bank is in some trouble. There goes your share price, new business and cooperation from other banks. This all hurts your company.
H3ll, the governement has been afraid the mere mention of acceptance of TARP funds would taint a bank, thus forcing other banks to accept it too. What would one of these 'special audits' do?
To those of you saying this article is unverified, nope. You wanna see an example of that go over to the "Repubs threaten filibuster if Obama releases torture memos'; now that's unverified. The only thing unverified here is the author's speculation on the motives; this stuff has been incurring including the vast increase in the gov's power over these instititions and their lack of accepting TARP fund repayment, and it's been all over the financial news.
Fern