B.M.

Treasury Accepts Lowball Price for TARP Warrants

that's BS. If GS and JPM hadn't approved the TARP, they'd have gone bye-bye due to counterparty risk. they were WAY overleveraged, and the AIG payments to GS show exactly what kind of risk GS had taken. The taxpayer deserves the full auctioned value of these warrants, not to mention the gov't shouldn't have done the TARP in the first place, allowing badly run banks to fail and good ones to survive.


On May 14 12:21 PM accountant wrote:

> The only problem with your thesis is that several of the original
> banks, including both Goldman and Morgan Stanley, had the government
> shove the TARP money down their throat. So why should the taxpayers
> make a bunch of excess profits off of the deal?
>
> Let's see, we'll force the banks to take TARP money that, in several
> cases, they don't need or want, we will grant ourselves warrants
> to buy their stock at cheap prices, thus diluting stockholder value,
> and then, if we don't demand top dollar for the warrants, we will
> claim that the taxpayer is getting hosed.
>
> Seems like an incredibly one-sided transaction to me.