An Obama Administration Insider Reveals the Truth about TARP and the Bank Bailouts

(New York, NY, May 23, 2012) – With the estimated $3 billion loss at JPMorgan Chase rekindling the debate about financial industry regulation, and with the government’s handling of the economic recovery the decisive issue in the fall elections, Free Press announced today a forthcoming book by Neil Barofsky, who served both the Bush and Obama administrations as the watchdog of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). BAILOUT: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street will be published on July 24, 2012.

From December 2008 until March 2011, Barofsky was the Special Inspector General charged with oversight of TARP, working to ensure against fraud and abuse in the spending of the $700 billion allocated for the bailouts. From the start he was in constant conflict with the officials at the Treasury Department in charge of the bailouts who were in thrall to the interests of the big banks and steadfastly failed to hold them accountable, even as they disregarded major job losses caused by the auto bailouts and failed to help struggling homeowners. Barofsky recounts how his reports of a wave of criminal mortgage fraud and other abuses being perpetrated against homeowners in connection with programs that the Treasury itself set up were ignored time and again.

Barofsky offers detailed accounts of the behind-the-scenes conflicts and his struggles with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the Bush appointed “TARP Czar” Neel Kashkari and his successor, the Obama appointed Herb Allison, and others. His revelations show in stark detail just how captured by Wall Street our political system is; why the banks have not been held accountable; and how the failure to enact effective regulation has put the country in danger of an even bigger crisis in the future.

Senior Editor Emily Loose acquired World rights, including audio and first serial, from David Kuhn of Kuhn Projects.

About the author

Neil Barofsky is currently a Senior Fellow at NYU School of Law.

###

~

4closureFraud.org