by Laura Conaway

On a quick read, a couple of points strike me in the new Congressional Oversight Panel report on the progress of TARP.

COP leader Elizabeth Warren still isn't convinced she's getting a straight enough story about the bank bailout from Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. "[T]he need for a clearly articulated strategy remains paramount," the report says.

COP thinks the bank bailout is still batter, and not yet cake. The COP report says it's too early to tell whether the economic assumptions TARP is based on will hold. "Economic forecasters have predicted that a recovery in GDP will commence in the fall," the commission writes. "However, the trend line in adjustments to those predictions has been consistently downward, with the projected beginning of the recovery receding into the future and its scale diminishing."

And then, of course, there's this bit about troubled banks:

 

All successful efforts to address bank crises have involved the combination of moving aside failed management and getting control of the process of valuing bank balance sheets. . . . History offers no examples in which subsidization of existing shareholders and management produced effective assessment of asset values.

Bloomberg's take on this: "Congressional Panel Suggests Firing Managers, Liquidating Banks"