TARP Oversight Chair Doesn't Know Whether It's Working

[Chris]

Obama's transparency czar is using $84 million to build a web site that won't be usable until October, and may not be useful until four years from now.

Obama's stimulus oversight guru, Joe Biden, says "people are being scammed already" in the disbursement of $787 billion.

And, when asked whether TARP is working, Prof. Elizabeth Warren— head of the Congressionally formed oversight committee for that particular trillion-dollar project says:

"We can't disclose what isn't known. We've disclosed as much as we can, we've addressed this in our various reports. The Secretary of the Treasury says there are some positive indicators and there some negative indicators still in the economy. And that's the best we can do.”

"We can see changes, we try to document those and we try to point out where their continue to be weaknesses,” she continued. "You know this isn't resolved yet, congressman. I'm sorry, it's just not. We're still in mid-crisis and there are both up arrows and down arrows."

Q: You've been quite critical of the Treasury. What troubles you most about what you're getting and what you're not getting?

A: There's no discussion of the overall policy. Instead, there are specific programs that are announced, and from that, it's necessary to reason backwards to figure out what the goal must have been. It's like a "Jeopardy!" game. If this is the answer, what was the question? It's frustrating because without a clearly articulated goal and identified metrics to determine whether the goal is being accomplished, it's almost impossible to tell if a program is successful.

Q: Do you have a clear sense of what the overall TARP plan at this point is supposed to do? Are you capable of summarizing what it's supposed to be doing?

A: No. And neither is Treasury. Treasury has given us multiple contradictory explanations for what it's trying to accomplish.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2009/06/tarp_oversight_chair_says_she.asp

[thundley4]

"We can't disclose what isn't known. We've disclosed as much as we can, we've addressed this in our various reports. The Secretary of the Treasury says there are some positive indicators and there some negative indicators still in the economy. And that's the best we can do.”

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.
Donald Rumsfeld

Remarkably similar, no? 

[Chris]

Remarkably similar, no? 

Ouch.  Good one.

[Chris_]

TARP Oversight Chair Doesn't Know Whether It's Working

In other words, TARP has switched on the nitrous for the engine of economic collapse aka the Federal Government's spending habits, but we can't say that publicly without springing the trapdoor on this Bear Rally the market's been in the past month or three.  Can't report that ReichsMessiah Øbama is actually LARGELY RESPONSIBLE for turning the United States into a third world debtor nation extraordinaire, can we?