By Cliff Montgomery – Jan. 9th, 2009
The leader of a congressional committee watching over America’s $700 billion financial bailout plan has toldreporters she is “shocked” that government officials can’t determine what has happened to much of thetaxpayer money.
Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard University law professor, stated on ABC’s Good Morning America Friday thatCongress “may want to take a very hard look” at how financial institutions that received most of the initialbailout payments have used those dollars. Warren’s panel recently released a study on the bailout fund.
She added that the Treasury Department, which is administering the program, “didn’t put any trackingmechanisms on it.”
If true, that would mean American citizens have no way of knowing for certain how banks are spending a singledollar of these massive giveaways, which are all at U.S. taxpayers’ expense.
Treasury also “didn’t tell the banks what they had to do in order to get the money,” Warren said.
Thus a bank giveaway “might be used for lending, it might be used to buy other banks…Or it might just bestuffed in vaults and left there,” she added.
