How many jobs were created or saved by the T.A.R.P. bailout?

[begin_within]

Just wondered.

[lumberjack_jeff]

1. Hard to tell.

There are those who say that the economic system would have completely failed without it.

So, the answer to your question might be "all of 'em". Or it might be none.

[ferrous wheel]

7. Closer to none than all.

I'd like it a lot more if we could have gotten back the money W threw away on the Iraq invasion.

[notesdev]

2. A lot

All those people employed in the financial piracy industry are very thankful too. Without government intervention, their preying days would be over!

[exboyfil]

3. I bet it amounts to the whole union payroll of Chrysler

Of course it is split between a 100 people instead of 10s of thousands at Chrysler

[Igel]

4. There's a chance somebody could come up with a number for

"jobs created" and make the number seem plausible.

For "jobs saved" you can pull any number out of your rear end. You'd have to figure out what the job loss would have been without TARP I and compare it with the job loss with TARP I.

That requires information that's not been made public. It requires a model that yields better figures than things like 1000 +/- 200k at the 5% confidence.

We don't have them. It's my complaint with Obama's "3 million jobs created or saved." Tracking responsibility for "created" is just barely possible, I figure. But "jobs saved" relies on your model and your assumptions, combined with unobtainable information. It requires faith, hope, and belief. But it's not falsifiable or provable.

[Uzybone]

5. TARP was not intended to create or save jobs

so the answer is probably 0.

[Idealism]

6. It didn't really create any

unless you count the lawyers who got hired to handle the legal oversight of these companies. TARP was to save the financial sector, and thus save those jobs. If you think along the lines of unintended consequences, it goes like this. At least 10% of the jobs in the US are in Banking, Real Estate or Investments. The other 90% have to get paid somehow...

Who knows how bad it would have gotten, is the scarier thought.

[customerserviceguy]

8. I don't recall any really major financial institutions biting the dust

after TARP, except for maybe Citibank having it's troubles. If we would have had a collapse of more banks, the credit crunch might even be more difficult to get out of than what we're looking at.

That said, the TARP legislation let hundreds, maybe thousands of muckety-mucks suck out one last big fat bonus before sailing off to some tax haven. It was poorly written, and provided no safeguards for the American public.

But what did anybody expect Hank Paulson to ask for?