Neil Barofksy, the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), recently released his audit of the emergency capital injections provided to Bank of America and other financial institutions through the TARP program, and the audit revealed that high ranking federal officials, including former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and current Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, misled the American people about the true financial state of Bank of America and the other initial TARP recipients which received an initial $125 billion bail out.
Paulson, Bernanke and others said that they were injecting money into these institutions because they were healthy and that doing this would allow these banks to lend money and unfreeze the credit market and show confidence in the U.S. Financial system. However, these banks were not healthy as the Treasury originally characterized them.
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