TARP, or, Paulson's Dead Parrot Sketch

I was taken totally by surprise yesterday when Treasury Sect'y Paulson announced the abandonment of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Surprised, not be the announcement that he wasn't going that route, but rather, surprised that TARP was still among his plans to stave off Great Depression II. And surprised that "the Markets" were surprised that the U.S. was not going to dump shitty liabilities on taxpayers rather than purchasing equity in the lenders. I had assumed that when Barney Frank and others had blown their respective noses on the napkin Paulson and Bernanke had used to write the TARP plan over a weekend last September, that that particular plan was dead.

Stupid me, I didn't realise that it was just "resting."

Dean Baker wonders, "where's the derision?"