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Bailout, August 2012
Hardcover / e-Book
An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street
Free Press
August 2012
On Sale: July 24, 2012
288 pages
ISBN: 1451684932
EAN: 9781451684933
Kindle: B00818J57W
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
In this bracing, page-turning account of his
stranger-than-fiction baptism into the corrupted ways of
Washington, Neil Barofsky offers an irrefutable indictment,
from an insider of the Bush and Obama administrations, of
the mishandling of the $700 billion TARP bailout fund. In
vivid behind-the-scenes detail, he reveals proof of the
extreme degree to which our government officials bent over
backward to serve the interests of Wall Street firms at the
expense of the broader public—and at the expense of
effective financial reform. During the height of the financial crisis in 2008, Barofsky
gave up his job as a prosecutor in the esteemed U.S.
Attorney’s Office in New York City, where he had convicted
drug kingpins, Wall Street executives, and perpetrators of
mortgage fraud, to become the special inspector general in
charge of oversight of the spending of the bailout money.
From his first day on the job, his efforts to protect
against fraud and to hold the big banks accountable for how
they spent taxpayer money were met with outright hostility
from the Treasury officials in charge of the bailouts. Barofsky discloses how, in serving the interests of the
banks, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and his team
worked with Wall Street executives to design programs that
would funnel vast amounts of taxpayer money to their firms
and would have allowed them to game the markets and make
huge profits with almost no risk and no accountability,
while repeatedly fighting Barofsky’s efforts to put the
necessary fraud protections in place. His investigations
also uncovered abject mismanagement of the bailout of
insurance giant AIG and Geithner’s decision to allow the
payment of millions of dollars in bonuses—including $7,700
to a kitchen worker and $7,000 to a mail room assistant—and
that the Obama administration’s “TARP czar” lobbied for the
executives to retain their high pay. Providing stark details about how, meanwhile, the interests
of homeowners and the broader public were betrayed, Barofsky
recounts how Geithner and his team steadfastly failed to fix
glaring flaws in the Obama administration’s homeowner relief
program pointed out by Barofsky and other bailout watchdogs,
rejecting anti-fraud measures, which unleashed a wave of
abuses by mortgage providers against homeowners, even
causing some who would not have lost their homes otherwise
to go into foreclosure. Ultimately only a small fraction
(just $1.4 billion at the time he stepped down) of the $50
billion allocated to help homeowners was spent, while the
funds expended to prop up the financial system—as Barofsky
discloses—totaled $4.7 trillion. As Barofsky raised the
alarm about the bailout failures, he met with obstruction of
his investigations, and he recounts in blow-by-blow detail
how an increasingly aggressive war was waged against his
efforts, with even the White House launching a broadside
against him. Bailout is a riveting account of his plunge
into the political meat grinder of Washington, as well as a
vital revelation of just how captured by Wall Street our
political system is and why the too-big-to-fail banks have
only become bigger and more dangerous in the wake of the
crisis.
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