Wells Fargo (WFC) is repaying their $25Bn TARP loan.
That makes WFC the last of the big boys to be done with the emergency loan program, just one year after it started. At this point $161Bn of the $245Bn lent out will be repaid with WFC raising $10.4Bn in a stock sale to get out from under the government’s thumb – just in time to pay out the Christmas bonuses. I won’t go off on a rant about how stupid it is for the banks to borrow and dillute in order to pay big bonuses and further punish shareholders by reducing earnings – it won’t matter anyway, any bank but C that announces they are done with TARP gets a nice boost as it indicates they can go back to raping and pillaging as usual in 2010.
It’s good that we can label this bailout a success because that way Congress won’t waste time approving the next one in March when CRE fails (oops, that’s supposed to be a secret). The banks were anxious to get out from under Government oversight as soon as their pay practices were called into question. Perhaps WFC was the last to pay us back as they “only” have 62 employees who got bonuses over $1M last year with just 7 employees putting more then $3M in bonus money under the tree. That’s nothing compared to C, who had 738 employees who would consider anything less than $1M a pay cut and you would think GS would be the leader with 983 Million Dollar bonus babies last year but they got nothing on JPM, where 1,626 Employees got 7-figure bonus checks.
Of course, GS beats JPM on a bonus per employee basis by a wide margin but that’s because JPM actually does own a bank while Goldman only pretends they are a bank when they have their hand out for government aid:
So move along folks, nothing to see here – all is well… You can tell by the sound bytes that even Obama is disgusted by this BS, particularly since the banks aren’t lending and, in fact, are putting more money into their foreclosure and litigation departments to really put the screws to the consumers who hold what may be flippable properties for the banks. After a record-setting 1.5M personal bankruptcies were filed in 2009 it looks like we’re on track to beat that in 2010 by as much as…
