TARP Application: “Two Pages, Most of it White Space”

Vanity Fair looks at how the TARP Program was run. After making all the big boys participate, Treasury strong-armed smaller banks as well. Ray Davis, the head of Umpqua Bank, a financially sound bank in Oregon, got the message that he’d better play ball and take TARP money:

The “application” was the paperwork for a capital infusion, and Davis was told it would be faxed over right away. By now he was sold on participating. “Here was somebody from the secretary of the Treasury calling,” Davis says, “and complimenting us on the strength of our company and saying you need to do this, to help the government, to be a good American citizen—all that stuff—and I’m saying, ‘That’s good. You’ve got me. I’m in.’”
The most urgent task was to complete the application and get it back to Treasury the next day, and this had Davis in a sweat: “I pictured this 200-page fax that would take me three weeks of work crammed into one evening.” Imagine Davis’s surprise when a staff member walked in soon afterward with the official “Application for tarp Capital Purchase Program.” It consisted of two pages, most of it white space.

Posted by on September 21st, 2009 at 11:51 am


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