In its latest study of the impact of the federal government's bailout efforts the Congressional Oversight Panel looks beyond US borders.  The COP August report focuses on the international impact of TARP, and finds that US rescue efforts provided some significant benefits overseas.  From the report:

Faced with the possible collapse of their most important financial institutions, many national governments intervened. One of the main components of the U.S. response was the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), which pumped capital into financial institutions, guaranteed billions of dollars in debt and troubled assets, and directly purchased assets. The U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve offered further support by allowing banks to borrow cheaply from the government and by guaranteeing selected pools of assets. Other nations‟ interventions used the same basic set of policy tools, but with a key difference: While the United States attempted to stabilize the system by flooding money into as many banks as possible – including those that had significant overseas operations – most other nations targeted their efforts more narrowly toward institutions that in many cases had no major U.S. operations. As a result, it appears likely that America‟s financial rescue had a much greater impact internationally than other nations‟ programs had on the United States. This outcome was likely inevitable given the structure of the TARP, but if the U.S. government had gathered more information about which countries‟ institutions would most benefit from some of its actions, it might have been able to ask those countries to share the pain of rescue. For example, banks in France and Germany were among the greatest beneficiaries of AIG‟s rescue, yet the U.S. government bore the entire $70 billion risk of the AIG capital injection program. The U.S. share of this single rescue exceeded the size of France‟s entire $35 billion capital injection program and was nearly half the size of Germany‟s $133 billion program.

COP Chair Elizabeth Warren discusses the report's key findings:

Read the full report here.