Treasury Hid A.I.G. Loss, SIGTARP Report Says

ZeroHedge has an interesting post on the SIGTARP report. The full report is available from this Congress' web link. I will just quote here from ZeroHedge:

Finally, the most specific of TARP's Main Street goals, "preserving homeownership" has so far fallen woefully short, with TARP's portion of the Administration's mortgage modification program yielding only approximately 207,000 ongoing permanent modifications since TARP's inception, a number that stands in stark contrast to the 5.5 million homes receiving foreclosure filings and more than 1.7 million homes that have been lost to foreclosure since January 2009.
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While SIGTARP offers no opinion on the appropriateness or accuracy of the valuation contained in the Retrospective, we believe that the Retrospective fails to meet basic transparency standards by failing to disclose: (1) that the new lower estimate followed a change in the methodology that Treasury previously used to calculate expected losses on its AIG investment; and (2) that Treasury would be required by its auditors to use the older, and presumably less favorable, methodology in the official audited financials statements. To avoid potential confusion, Treasury should have disclosed that it had changed its valuation methodology and should have published a side-by-side comparison of its new numbers with what the projected losses would be under the auditor-approved methodology that Treasury had used previously and will use in the future. This conduct has left the Treasury vulnerable to charges it has manipulated its methodology for calculating losses to present two different numbers depending on its audience: one designed for release in early October as part of a multifaceted publicity campaign touting the positive aspects of TARP and emphasizing the reduction in anticipated losses, and one, audited by the GAO for release in November as part of a larger audited financial statement. Here again, Treasury's unfortunate insensitivity to the values of transparency has led it to engage in conduct that risks further damaging public trust in the Government.
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Increased moral hazard and concentration in the financial industry continue to be a TARP legacy. The biggest banks are bigger than ever, fueled by the Government support and taxpayer-assisted mergers and acquisitions. And the repeated statement that the Government would stand by these banks during the financial crisis has given a significant advantage to the larger "too big to fail" banks, as reflected in their enhanced credit ratings borner from a market perception the Government will still not let these institutions fails, although the impact of this cost may be blunted by recently enacted regulatory reform.
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While it may be true that many homeowners may benefit from temporarily reduced payments even though the modification ultimately fails, Treasury's claim that "every single person" who participated in HAMP gets a "significant benefit" is either hopelessly out of touch with the real harm that has been inflicted on many families or a cynical attempt to define success as failure. Worse, Treasury's apparent belief that all failed trial modifications are successes may preclude it from seeking to make the meaningful changes necessary to provide the "sustainable" mortgage relief for struggling families it first promised. What Treasury deems a universal benefit, many homeowners, members of Congress, and a growing number of commentators describe as "cruel" and offering little more than "false hope."
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At a time when the country was experiencing the worst economic downturn in generations and the Government was asking its taxpayers to support a $787 billion stimulus package designed primarily to preserve jobs, Treasury made a series of decisions that may have substantially contributed to the accelerated shuttering of more than 2,000 small businesses, thereby potentially adding tens of thousands of workers to the already lengthy unemployment rolls -all without sufficient consideration of the decisions' broader economic impact...That the automakers have offered reinstatement to hundreds of terminated dealerships in response to Congressional action without any apparent sacrifice of their ongoing viability further demonstrates the possibility that such dramatic and accelerated dealership closings may not have been necessary and underscores the need for Treasury to tread very carefully when considering such decisions in the future.

At least these documents are available publicly. Are there going to be any prosecutions, Mr Attorney General?

NYTimes also published a report about the SIGTARP report: Treasury Hid A.I.G. Loss, Report Says.