Along with Dean Baker and a few others, I’ve been fighting a lonely crusade against those who insist that TARP “made money.” In a new report, the GAO faults Treasury for constantly shifting the goalposts on how they report that “profit” from TARP. It’s a slightly different argument, but one that highlights how this illusion of a successful TARP lies in manipulation of the numbers.

The European Central Bank is firing its bazooka and lending massive amounts to European banks, which they can use to purchase Euro government debt that pay higher interest for some easy money. It’s a backdoor way of being the lender of last resort for sovereign debt, while bailing out the banksters.

The new plan to save Europe includes a condition that, says Felix Salmon, private bondholders cannot take losses on any future eurozone bail-outs. This is merely an invitation for recklessness by the bondholders, with a giant safety net put under them by Europe.

One of the ways in which the big banks were bailed out was through an artificially high credit rating based on the assumption that they would always get bailed out if they got into trouble. This was a major advantage for them over their competitors. Now S&P Rating Services is downgrading major banks.

A report by Bloomberg reveals that the Federal Reserve under Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner (at the New York Fed) secretly loaned over seven trillions dollars to arguably insolvent banks and financial institutions to keep them afloat, while concealing the scope of the lending from Congress and even member of the Treasury Department charged with allocating TARP bailouts.

The judge stated flatly that the penalty against the back, $95 million, is 1/7 of the level of the investor losses on the deal. “So the net effect of this is that you’re only returning a small fraction of what the investors lost, yes,” he said.

Why, oh why, would anyone protest the current financial state of this country? The average individual now has $1,315 less in disposable income than he or she did three years ago at the onset of the Great Recession – even though the recession ended, technically speaking, in mid-2009…the most dramatic drop in the US standard [...]

This has been described as another bailout, and it’s not hard to see why. The derivatives go into the insured institution, protecting the counter-parties, and they would be paid off in the event of a failure. Notice that the counter-parties themselves are managing the process, requesting that their bets get implicit government backing. The notional value on these derivatives trades is $75 trillion, with a T. This includes their European derivatives exposure. And according to Bloomberg, JPMorgan Chase has already done this.

It looks like Dexia Bank will be the first large European bank to fall to speculation about losses on its loans to Greece, and this may be a sign of things to come. Dexia is partly owned by the Belgian Government and partly by the French Government, the result of a 2008 bailout. It’s another sign that many other banks, all of whom “passed” stress test, are also in trouble.

I’m not sure if this is information we already knew from the Fed audit, or an additional set of data, or maybe just the specifics that came out of that Bloomberg FOIA request. At any rate, Bloomberg has presented it in a very direct manner with a very provocative title: “Wall Street Aristocracy Got $1.2 Trillion in Secret Fed Loans.” I think some activist snuck into the Bloomberg offices and wrote this report.