The Bailout Was 11 Years Ago. We're Still Tracking Every Penny.
vEleven years ago, with the stock market in free fall, Congress passed a $700 billion bailout of the financial system.
ProPublica was still in its infancy, our website only a few months old. Like everyone else, we were just trying to get a handle on what was happening.
It wasn’t easy. After starting out as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, a plan to buy up troubled mortgages, the TARP soon morphed into a bailout of the giant insurer AIG, the nation’s banks, and then the auto industry. It was hard to keep up. So we decided to try.
Our bailout database laid it all out as clearly as we could understand it. But it got harder. The Obama administration transformed the TARP into a mind-numbing array of acronyms, and we did our best to tell a PPIP from a AIFP (you don’t want to know). As the years went on and billions continued to flow back and forth, we remained vigilant. And, well, it turns out that bailouts are forever. We’re still updating the damn thing. So, recently, we decided to give it a makeover.
Read more: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-bailout-was-11-years-ago-were-still-tracking-every-penny
