What The Banks Are Doing With Our Money

Mark Twain once said: ‘If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.’

How right he was.

When we, the taxpayers, picked up the starving banks and made them prosperous again, they didn’t just bite us, they mauled us.

The innocuously named TARP is plainly and simply the biggest heist the world has ever seen. $700 billion dollars of our money to pay for their screwups. That’s about $2000 for every single man, woman, and child in the United States. Never before has the incompetence and greed of so few been borne by so many.

And the worst part is, the heist isn’t over. It’s still going on, right under our noses! That $700 billion (which, incidentally, is enough to provide free health care for the uninsured for the next decade - source) won’t do a jot towards making the economy fine and dandy again. Why? Simply because the vast majority is being misallocated or downright squandered. What incentive do the big banks have to lift their game now that the we’ve effectively handed them a blank check?

Take the fine folks at Citibank (C), who were waiting on their brand-new tax-payer funded $50 million Dassault Falcon 7X before the Obama administration put the nix on it. ABC News has the scoop:

The high-flying execs at Citigroup caved under pressure from President Obama and decided today to abandon plans for a luxurious new $50 million corporate jet from France.

The decision came 24 hours after the banking giant, which was rescued by a $45 billion taxpayer lifeline, defended buying the state-of-the-art Dassault Falcon 7X - one of nine to be flying in U.S. skies - as a smart business deal.

The jet, the epitome of corporate prestige and privilege, can carry 12 passengers in elegant comfort.

ABC News has learned that on Monday officials of the Obama administration called Citigroup about the company’s new $50 million corporate jet and told execs to “fix it.”

While the current administration should be applauded in this instance, the reality is that most injustices will slip through the net. Many already have. US Bancorp, which received a ‘mere’ $6.6 billion of taxpayer money has found a particularly ‘creative’ use for their bailout money - buying up their smaller competitors who did not qualify for the TARP. Many other banks have followed suit.

In other words, our money is being used to make the banking industry even less competitive than it already is, and create a whole new bunch of unprofitable, incompetent businesses that are ‘too big to fail’.

Subscribe by RSS Subscribe by Email