Bailout

An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street

By: Neil Barofsky

Narrated by: Joe Barrett

An insider of both the Bush and Obama administrations offers an irrefutable indictment of the mishandling of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program bailouts and the extreme degree to which our government officials—from both parties—served the interests of Wall Street at the expense of the public.

From his first day on the job as the special inspector general in charge of overseeing the distribution of the bailout money, Neil Barofsky found that the officials at the Treasury Department in charge of the bailouts were in thrall to the interests of the big banks. In vivid behind-the-scenes detail he reveals how they steadfastly failed to hold the banks accountable even as they disregarded major job losses caused by the auto bailouts and refused to help struggling homeowners. He discloses how the team at the Treasury under Secretary Timothy Geithner worked with Wall Street executives to design programs that would have funneled vast amounts of taxpayer money to their firms and allowed them to game the markets and make huge profits with almost no risk and no accountability. Providing stark details about how—through a combination of sheer incompetence and a profound disregard of the plight of homeowners—the interests of the broader public were betrayed, he recounts how an increasingly aggressive war was waged by the Treasury against his efforts to raise the alarm about the failures.

Bailout is a riveting account of his plunge into the political meat grinder of Washington, as well as a vital revelation of just how captive to Wall Street our political system is and why the too-big-to-fail banks have only become bigger and more dangerous in the wake of the crisis.

Neil Barofsky is currently a senior fellow at New York University School of Law. From December 2008 until March 2011, he served as the special inspector general in charge of oversight of the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Before that he was a federal prosecutor in the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Bailout is his first book.

©2012 Neil Barofsky (P)2012 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Excellent, detailed and enlightening

This is not a play for attention from a disgruntled government employee. Neil’s accounting of Tarp programs display deft knowledge of financial institutions, and the assumptions that led to the 2008 crisis. The story is also told with a very readable narrative. Conversations with Barney Frank, Tim Geithner, Grassley, and other key figures pull back the curtains on the Obama admin’s greatest failure, but this book doesn’t “bash” anyone... except maybe Geithner. I’m a Democrat, and I enjoyed it.

Bailout is hard to hear but important to know!

Would you listen to Bailout again? Why?

Yes, if I wanted to understand some of the more complex issues that the author explains

What was one of the most memorable moments of Bailout?

When Neil decides that he is there to do his job and not worry about his future in Washington. He seemed to be one of the few there who had that kind of integrity.

Have you listened to any of Joe Barrett’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

No I have not.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

It made me angry and it made me lose confidence in our government the way it is currently structured.

Any additional comments?

I have little understanding of the financial system in this country and at times it was hard to follow but Neil did a great job explaining the majority of it. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to keep their head out of the sand!

Grass Gets Trampled When Giants Fight

Would you try another book from Neil Barofsky and/or Joe Barrett?

This is probably a one off for Mr. Barofsky. I doubt he will be in a position of power like this with an interesting story to tell any time soon.

Who was your favorite character and why?

Tim Geithner. You gotta love a guy that is a tool of the machine and is unyielding in that duty.

Did the narration match the pace of the story?

Yes.

What else would you have wanted to know about Neil Barofsky’s life?

Nothing?

Any additional comments?

This book gives really interesting insight into the financial crisis with details and explanations that are completely missed by many of the other books available on the topic. Mr. Barofsky is obviously a nobody sent to D.C. to do a thankless job. His perspective of the mortgage crisis is important because he looks at what was happening on the ground floor with a lot more detail. Most other books detail the CDOs, CDS, and securitization issues, but Mr. Barofsky spends a significant amount of time on the point of contact between the public and the mortgage dealer.
The reviews pan Mr. Barofsky as a hyperbolic bean counter attempting to go whistle blower in an attempt to minimize his profile and story. The problem is that his story and experience ring true for anyone who has been personally involved with a mortgage issue in the last five years.
TARP was a give away to the banks. Our financial regulatory policies are being dictated to our Congress by those who are being regulated. The status quo in Washington is a hinderance to the nation's future growth.
All of this is true...but the only way it can change is through a duly elected official who has a constituency that supports them, not a presidential appointment that can be quickly and quietly replaced via Friday afternoon press release.

Not what I expected.

I struggled listening through to the end. Book Was more focused on the author’s role which was of no particular interest to me. But a good summary of the underlying politics.

We need more people like this in government

A former Washington official's description of how difficult it is to stand up to the dysfunctional system and do what's right.

Not an explanation of the financial crisis

This book does a good job of digging into the weeds of TARP oversight. I recommend the book with the caveat that it will not help you understand the big picture of the financial crisis.

This book doesn't do what some readers think it does, specifically make a case against Troubled Asset Relief Program TARP. The author is a prosecutor, not an economist or bank regulator.

The author comes across as well-intentioned at providing oversight of the Troubled Asset Relief Program. He earns 4-stars for his thoughtful identification of ways that fraudsters might game the program, and he shows that preventing such fraud was not the highest priority of the Treasury Department. But of course, the Treasury Department's priority was to prevent another great depression. He doesn't address the fact that TARP seems to have succeeded - the financial system didn't collapse. TARP was repaid, even earning some profit to the government. And the author's very legitimate fears of fraud seem not to have materialized, at least on any large scale.

Throughout the book, the author's antagonists argue that the author's proposals would have jeopardized the success of TARP without providing commensurate benefits at reducing fraud. Naturally, while listening to his book, we are inclined to take his side in these disagreements. But the book simply doesn't provide enough detail for the reader to make an informed judgement about who is right. The truth is that there are tradeoffs to empowered IGs; they reduce fraud at the expense of creating a more bureaucratic, CYA culture. And, by focusing on process and indicators, IG performance audits encourage what in "The Wire" was called "Juking the stats." Sometimes making government a little more sclerotic is a small price to pay for better accountability, but everything has tradeoffs. I wish the author had addressed the tradeoffs.

The author embraces the label "backseat driver" that was given to him by his antagonists. Yes, his job was to look back at mistakes made by government officials. But I found his big-picture policy critiques much less persuasive than his micro-level fraud prevention commentary. As the inspector general during the financial crises, he was like a the backseat driver of a car that swerves off the road to avoid hitting a semi truck. Now, imagine that backseat driver criticizes the damage done to the car by leaving the road without explaining how he would have avoided the semi truck.

The author makes an impassioned case for reducing the principle mortgage balance for people who bought houses they couldn't afford. He acknowledges that this was unpopular (such programs were the original inspiration for the tea party), but suggests homeowner bailouts were only fair in the context of the bailouts of too big to fail financial institutions. But fair has nothing to do with it. The unfortunate need to bailout financial institutions is in the name, "TOO BIG to fail". Underwater homeowners were, by contrast, clearly small enough to fail. One unfair policy that rescues the economy doesn't justify an additional unfair policy that is unrelated to economy-wide risks. The financial deregulation policies of the Reagan, Clinton and Bush administrations set us on a path that would eventually require the bank bailout. Once that path had been set in motion, the task was to save the economy at minimal cost, not create wide-ranging programs that didn't address the semi-truck in our headlights.

Bailing out homeowners (by reducing the mortgage principal) would be nice, but the author never presented a coherent alternative course of action that takes account of the consequences of imposing very large losses on the banks. To do so would have required hundreds of billions of dollars in additional bailout money. The government could have done this, but likely at the cost of the health care reform that was enacted around this time. Money and political capital are not unlimited. The bank bailouts, by contrast, were loans that were repaid in full, and even generated some profit for the government.

I recommend this book to readers who want a firsthand account of an IG and thoughtful discourse on preventing fraud in government financial sector programs. For a big-picture understanding of the financial crisis, I recommend "After the Music Stopped."

Thanks for sharing your experiences.

I appreciate your candor in reporting how both parties handled this matter, whether good or bad.
Sadly not surprised, and others should share their experiences as well.

An insider's account of the Wall Street bailout

Would you consider the audio edition of Bailout to be better than the print version?

no. This book is great. It doesn't matter what form the book is in.

What other book might you compare Bailout to and why?

I've read somewhere around 6 books on the bailout and none of them have the level of detail, inside knowledge and political insight as this book. I had always suspected that Treasury was the reason that we have no real homeowner assistance with mortgage reassessments or payment decreases or equity adjustments. Now we have proof. This book ties together verifiable data and press releases with insider information to complete the puzzle of why we still don't have a true recovery and why we still have "too big to fail" and "too big to sue".

Well written, well narrated, tight, condensed but leaving nothing out.

An Excellent book and Audible title.

Which character – as performed by Joe Barrett – was your favorite?

n/a

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

I would not want to listen to this book in one sitting. To walk away with such damning information of my government's collusion with Wall Street is depressing enough over the course of a week. To find all this out in one day would be too much for one person to handle.

A must read if you care about America's future

Want to know how your government really works? What forces really shape policy? Want to know why the current financial crisis is not the problem, its just a symptom of the real problem that is destroying America!

This work is an in depth account of all the forces that came together to create the housing bubble and its inevitable collapse. The Gorden Gecko character from "Wall Street" is a small time operator compared to the real sharks and thieves running our economy!

Super informative, also, maddening

If anybody wants a quick primer to how government actually works, read this. Also, it gives a ton of laymen knowledge about 2008 that I think everybody should be in possession of.