Super-Glued to the Gummint

Whoa, nellie...

...the Treasury will be hanging onto their stock warrants [in TARP-accepting banks] after the TARP loans are repaid and the prefered stock the Treasury received as part of the package is bought back, only releasing the warrants after a further negotiated settlement.

Item #2 - Fox Business reports that Treasury officials are considering converting the the aforementioned prefered stock into common stock, complete with voting rights. In several instances, that would make the government the largest voting shareholder.

Item #3 (H/T - Legal Insurrection) - The Financial Times reports that repayment would be accepted only if it were in the “national economic interest”.

There is no definition of "national economic interest".

Taken at face value, Geithner and Obama have decided that they will remain positioned to take over management and control of the country's largest Banks any damn time they feel like it.

We mentioned that nationally, bank "non-borrowed reserves" went negative in January 2008, which happens to be a very, very, very serious situation. By October '08, things had gotten much worse, thus "TARP" came into existence.

We don't know the results of the "stress tests" yet; it's possible that a number of the TARP banks failed them, and the Feds have decided to continue their 'room-mate' arrangement for a while, covering ALL the TARP banks, not just those which failed.

HT: Eggster