Arm the COP on the Bank Beat

[katty]

The decisions that are made in the next six months or so are likely to set the economic course of this country for the next 50 years," says Elizabeth Warren, who chairs the COP, the Congressional Oversight Panel charged with reviewing the banking bailout. "That's what happened coming out of the Great Depression, and I think that will happen now."
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Robert L. Borosage

So Warren is pushing for Treasury to show us the money. What has been done with the $4 trillion the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporations have poured into the financial houses to date? In February, Warren's committee revealed that Treasury provided the top ten TARP recipients with a subsidy of $78 billion over the market value of the preferred shares purchased for taxpayers, even while stating publicly that the purchases were made "at par."

But it has been hard going. This weeks' brief hearing with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner represented the first time a Treasury official appeared before the panel. And repeated requests for documents were met with "prolonged silence," in the words of COP commissioner Damon Silvers, until Treasury finally disgorged 10,000 documents this week.
The Committee's April report summarized the experience of this and other countries in previous banking crises and concluded that successful resolutions all involved four critical elements:

transparency (particularly an honest evaluation of bank holdings),
assertiveness (including shutting down banks that were irreparably insolvent),
accountability (replacing management and prosecuting criminal conduct)
clarity (forthright reporting on use of public funds)"