Articles About Main Street

The Treasury Department just raked in a cool $25 billion for the American taxpayer. It sold the agency-backed mortgage-backed securities (MBS) that it bought during the financial crisis.  “The successful sale of these securities marks another important milestone in the wind-down of the government’s emergency financial crisis response efforts,” said Mary Miller, Treasury assistant secretary […]

A top Treasury official defended the federal government’s $700 billion bank bailout financial crisis-response program at a hearing where the effort was criticized by members of a watchdog panel insisting that it did more for Wall Street than Main Street. “The cost of TARP is likely to be no greater than the amount spent on […]

With the stock market ending its best December since 1987, there is hope that 2011 will see a strong Wall Street recovery.  One source of hope is the fact that the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index has returned to its pre-Lehman Brothers level.  It joins the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the Nasdaq Composite Index and […]

An independent audit released by the bipartisan Congressional Oversight Panel (COP) has found the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to be effective, so much so that the Department of the Treasury has extended it to October 3, 2010.  Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner plans to use the remaining funds to assist families facing foreclosure […]

Paulson’s TARP (Troubled Assets Relief Program) turnaround – he originally dismissed the bailout package as a recipe for “failure” -may demonstrate that his revised response is a gesture to public opinion.  At present, the bailout also seems geared more to help Main Street than Wall Street, a strategy that will play well with the general […]

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is sitting on $350 billion dollars of the taxpayers’ money, and can’t quite settle on the best way to spend it.  When approved by Congress in October, the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) bill’s purpose was to purchase bad mortgage assets that had frozen the credit markets. The Treasury Department […]