Bailout
Subtitle: How washington abandoned main street while rescuing wall street
By: Neil Barofsky
Edition: 1st Free Press trade paperback  ed.
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2013
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 272
ISBN-13: 9781451684957
Subjects: Finance; Subsidies; Banks and banking; Corporate debt; Global Financial Crisis, 2008-2009; Rich people; Troubled Asset Relief Program (U.S.)
Description: In this 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 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 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 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.
Notes: Includes a new foreword to the paperback edition.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 237-260) and index.
Table of contents: title: Fraud 101; title: Hank wants to make it work; title: The lapdog, the watchdog, and the junkyard dog; title: I won't lie for you; title: Drinking the Wall Street kool-aid; title: The worst thing that happens, we go back home; title: By Wall Street for Wall Street; title: Foaming the runway; title: The audacity of math; title: The essential $7,700 kitchen assistant; title: Treasury's backseat driver; title: Happy endings.