Spero Consulting

Archive for October 14th, 2008

We must admit, this is our first post that is truly in bad taste, but it seems so appro­pri­ate that we just could not help our­selves. TARP. TARP.

We’re try­ing to write seri­ously about the government’s – the Trea­sury Department’s – lat­est expe­di­en­cies and tac­tics to … well, we’re not sure of the objec­tive… pre­sum­ably, to make it all go away so that Mr. Bush and his appointees can enjoy their last Autumn and Christ­mas in D.C. (Why would any­one want to ruin Mr. Bush’s last Christ­mas in the White House by caus­ing the pos­si­ble finan­cial ruin of much of the world. Peo­ple can be so mean and self­ish some­times! Can’t we just use the tax­pay­ers’ money to pay them to go away!)

So here is our per­sonal prob­lem. Every time we think of TARP we are reminded of Garp as in John Irving’s The World Accord­ing to Garp. It has been a long time since we’ve read it; so, the details are slightly hazy, but we think we’ve remem­bered enough to draw the cor­rect analogy.

We’re not actu­ally reminded of Garp him­self, so much, but more of his father T.S. Garp, the critically-​wounded, WWII sol­dier, who spends his last days bedrid­den and sense­less in a state­side army hos­pi­tal. As we recall, he had been a ball-​turret gun­ner on per­haps the under­side of a B17 or B24, who took shrap­nel to the head dur­ing a bomb­ing raid over Germany.

“T.S.” were not his first two ini­tials, but rep­re­sented his rank, Tech­ni­cal Sergeant, which is about all of the back­ground his mother, an attend­ing hos­pi­tal nurse in the same ward, knew of his father.

As we recall, despite his dimin­ished state, T.S. Garp had one com­pul­sion, which he seemed to be able to do uncon­sciously and def­i­nitely not self-​consciously. Dur­ing these com­pul­sive episodes, he would repeat his name, “Garp, Garp.…” As his con­di­tion wors­ened, his mantra changed to “Arp, Arp…” and finally, just before his death to “Ar, Ar…”

In our mind, many of the Treasury’s recent tac­tics don’t seem that dif­fer­ent than T.S. Garp’s last efforts. How­ever, within a shorter period of time – less than two weeks – they seemed to have gone from “TARP, TARP…” to “RP, RP.…”

The injec­tion of cap­i­tal to “save the banks” seems to be noth­ing more than a Relief Pro­gram. Cor­po­rate wel­fare and crony­ism at its self-​indulgent best.

So did yesterday’s tough talk go like this? “We’re forc­ing you to take this money, which no one else will lend to you, and you won’t lend to each other. Fur­ther­more, to show you we mean busi­ness, we’re going to guar­an­tee your debt for a frac­tion of the true, underlying, insurance pre­mium, and finally, before you say any­thing, know that we’re going to insure your deposits, too. That should teach you to get into a mess like this, again.” Maybe Mr. Paul­son should read John Rose­mond, rather than con­tact­ing his for­mer employ­ees and his friends for advice on how to save themselves.

Once again, shame on them.

As they spend our money–all of our money–the cru­elty of those two near-​homonyms, sense and cents – all 70 tril­lion of the lat­ter – becomes bru­tally clear.