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Banking, finance, and taxes

US Guaranteed $4.5 Trillion In Financial Assets Creating Huge Taxpayer Risk

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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The Congressional Oversight Panel has issued its latest report on how the government’s huge bailout of the financial system is going. The most startling part of the document is that it describes the federal government’s $4.5 trillion guarantee of financial assets which put huge sums of taxpayer money at risk and, according to the panel, created a significant “moral hazard” which could encourage banks to return to risky behavior in anticipation that the government will always provide them with a safety net.

The panel has good things to say about the Treasury’s recent reaction to the credit crisis because its analysis of the department’s actions point to an aggressive attempt to get taxpayer money back from the financial firms which got federal support. Its analysis shows that the only program which has lost a great deal of money so far is the FDIC. It remains to be seen how money put into the country’s largest banks will do.

While the report takes a great deal of space dealing with the legal and accounting issues of TARP and other programs, it is an encouraging picture of how the Administration took huge risks to save the financial system, but then methodically worked to get the capital back.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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