What Happened to the Financial Bailout Money?

 
It’s ironic that when a consumer applies for a loan, the first question is what the money will be spent on. Yet the banks and lenders that ask this same question can’t seem to answer it for themselves when it comes to the huge financial bailout. No one seems to know or want to say where the U.S. taxpayers’ money is going in regards to the recent financial bailout that was passed by Congress and ordered by Presidents Bush and Barack Obama. Twenty-five billion went to JP Morgan Chase, and yet they refuse to tell the general public where the money is going and what they spent it on. This unfortunately leads to speculation, when no lending is going on and yet the money keeps disappearing. Whose paycheck is getting stuffed with a bonus, and where is the plan for the rest of the money?
 
No one knows the answer to these questions. There were 21 banks contacted in a recent Associated Press report, who were all asked four basic questions:
 
-How much has been spent?
-Where did it go?
-How much is being saved?
-What is the plan for the rest of the money?
 
Of 21 banks, not a single one actually offered specific answers. Most casually brush it off, saying merely that some has been lent out, some hasn’t, and more of it just goes unaccounted for. The point of giving this money in the first place was to stimulate the lending process again, but too many banks are sitting quietly, doing nothing more than hoarding the money, spending it on bonuses, or buying other banks that aren’t doing well despite the bailout. However, when the money was designated, there were no rules or process to regulate the spending of this money that was explicitly laid out for these lenders. Who is responsible for the fiasco? Is it George W Bush, or head of the House Banking Committee, Barney Frank, or Chris Dodd?
 
Where is the accountability? If you took out a car loan and used the money instead to go on a shopping spree, you would be held accountable for that money, and for explaining why it was misused. As taxpayers, don’t people deserve the right to know where their tax dollars went? It’s not like banks operate in a classified manner or do anything secretive. We just want to hear that the money is being spent on consumer lending, improving business, and helping the economy, not on letting your executives take a three-week hiatus to the Caribbean on the company’s dime.
 
It’s ironic that these companies won’t separate the money in their budgets so that it can be accounted for, or that they won’t allocate it to a special fund specifically geared toward fixing the broken economy. Instead, it seems that it just became a part of their balance sheets, and will go untracked because there are no rules to say that they have to tell. Americans might never get a clear answer as to where $700 billion dollars went, and somehow the country will just have to be okay with that.
 

This sound just like one more reason to invest in gold while we wait for the economy to collapse.