You?re not alone. Lifelong Democrat Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, is not willing the buy the hype, either.
The latest Bloomberg Businessweek shares the details:
The blunt-talking bailout cop is still hiring investigators and intends to keep his office open 8 to 10 years more. He employs 140 and has opened four more U.S. offices to probe fraud cases. “TARP being over is spin,” he says.
None of this amuses the White House, which lambasted Barofsky, a former federal prosecutor from New York, on its blog last month. The missive, from Deputy Communications Director Jen Psaki, accused him of trying to “grab a few cheap headlines” by disputing Treasury’s October estimate that the rescue of insurer American International Group would cost $5 billion, a huge drop from the $45 billion projected in March.
Barofsky says Treasury was playing with numbers when it changed how it valued its AIG holdings. Treasury says the numbers are based on the government’s new plan to exit its AIG investment by converting its stake, now in preferred stock, to common. Psaki said Treasury used AIG’s common price because preferred stock doesn’t trade. The new estimate is realistic, she blogged, and “some people just don’t like movies with happy endings.”
Treasury is “just manipulating numbers for a big PR push,” Barofsky told Bloomberg TV. He later called Psaki’s posting “staggeringly inappropriate.”
