Corker Uses Hearing to Question Bailout

Tennessee Republican Bob Corker shifted focus during today’s Senate Banking Committee hearing into the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.

For the most part, the hearing focused on oversight of the government’s banking bailout. But when Senator Corker’s turn came, he questioned the program itself.

At its worst, Corker says government concerns itself with the details of following plans rather than questioning whether there might be a better way. He speculated that supposedly healthy banks are taking and holding TARP money because they anticipate big problems in the near future.

“We’re going to borrow a trillion dollars and then I know, and you know, and they now and the banks know and everybody that’s involved in this knows there is still another trillion, minimum coming, and a whole lot more than that in losses.”

The committee chairman didn’t dispute that assertion. But Senator Chris Dodd defended TARP as the best choice the government could make at a time when the nation’s leading financial officers were all predicting disaster.

“I’m deeply furious about how it’s been managed. But at some point we’ve got to go forward. We can’t go back and redebate September all the time. We’ve got to decide where do we go from here and how do we make this work well.”

Senator Corker did vote for the bill that created TARP. At the time, he expressed hope that the government would ultimately see a return on the money put into the program. That doesn’t seem likely now. The committee heard testimony that the Treasury Department has significantly overpaid banks to the tune of approximately $78 billion dollars more than the stock is worth.