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A House committee held hearings into the Treasury Department's TARP bailout of the financial industry now that almost half of its $700bn has been spent and ABC's Betsy Stark (embargoed link) took A Closer Look. "Many in Congress say Treasury has violated the intent of the program first by deciding not to use it to buy up toxic mortgages and then by choosing to rescue big banks over ordinary Americans," she concluded. "If Treasury officials were to return to Congress for the second half of that $700bn they would likely get a very chilly reception." Sharyl Attkisson turned the clock back to the political parties' nominating conventions this summer for her Follow the Money report on CBS. She used statistics from the Campaign Finance Institute to find $14m in political contributions by financial institutions that only weeks later received billions in federal bailout funds: FreddieMac, AIG and Citigroup were major donors.
CNBC's Trish Regan illustrated the illiquidity of the credit markets in a report on the price of T-bills for NBC. She called it "a sign that investors are growing increasingly desperate for security" that they are willing to lend money to the Treasury Department at a zero rate of interest, "the market equivalent of putting money under the mattress—you put $1 in; you get $1 back." CNBC is hardly a hotbed of Keynesians. Like her colleague Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, Regan does not see cheap federal funds as enabling government pump priming. Instead she insisted that investors should switch their investments back to the corporate sector to end economic stagnation: "Companies need to be investing in people, in infrastructure, in new technology in order for the overall economy to grow."
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