Treasury bailouts abused and vulnerable for further abuse - watchdog

SHOOT: Initially when these bailouts were being conducted someone said: When the curtains of your house are on fire you don't waste time finding out how it started, you immediately put out the fire. Great analogy. Except when you use a bottle of kerosene to douse the flames (a perhaps a small spill from that bottle caused the fire). Someone else said that certyain companies were too big too fail. What if saving these companies temporarily leads to a collapse of everything else (which is theoretically also too big to fail).
The failure to learn from one set of mistakes necessarily escalates a crisis. And we aren't. Greed, corruption, investment is continuing as though there is no tomorrow. And there might well not be.

clipped from news.yahoo.com WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Treasury's plan to purge toxic assets from banks' balance sheets is vulnerable to fraud and abuse and needs tough rules against conflict of interest, the government's bailout watchdog said on Tuesday. Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), said in a report that subsidies for public-private investment partnerships (PPIP) to buy assets could expose taxpayers to higher losses without corresponding increases in the potential for profit. "Aspects of PPIP make it inherently vulnerable to fraud, waste and abuse, including significant issues relating to conflicts of interest facing fund managers, collusion between participants and vulnerabilities to money laundering," said Barofky's second quarterly report since he took office in December.