Re-TARP-ed

TW: I have yet to meet a financial industry professional who does not believe our financial system was on the brink of collapse last fall. Not collapse as in another bank would have gone down like BofA, or the market would have gone down even more, but collapse as in your ATM would not have worked for awhile perhaps a long while and if that had happened for even a day or two things would have gotten real interesting really fast.

That said now that the world (for now at least) has not fallen apart, certain panderific folks are going to come out of the woodwork to claim TARP was not necessary. There were fools like Mike Pence saying as much at the time and I would expect intellectually challenged folks like Palin to make such claims. But Mitt Romney knows better. He is something worse- a pander monkey, a tendency he exhibited often during the Republican primaries.

From James Pethokoukis at Reuters:
"OK, here is what the front runner (at least according to the online betting markets) for the 2012 GOP nomination said at the Value Voters summit over the weekend:

'When government is trying to take over health care, buying car companies, bailing out banks, and giving half the White House staff the title of czar – we have every good reason to be alarmed and to speak our mind!'

Now that does sounds like a repudiation of TARP. And here is what Mitt Romney told me in March:

'The TARP program, while not transparent and not having been used as wisely it should have been, was nevertheless necessary to keep banks from collapsing in a cascade of failures. You cannot have a free economy and free market if there is not a financial system. … The TARP program was designed to keep the financial system going, to keep money circulating in the economy, without which the entire economy stops and you would really have an economic collapse.'

Now that does sound like an endorsement of TARP. If Romney liked it then and doesn’t like it now for policy reasons, I think that is OK. But if that is the case, he should explain is reasoning and change of mind. Of course, the cynical explanation is that Romney now realizes that among many conservative GOPers, endorsement of TARP is almost a disqualifier for the 2012 nomination. So he is trying to muddy his support a bit..."
http://blogs.reuters.com/james-pethokoukis/2009/09/21/did-romney-flip-flop-on-tarp/