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When Congress created the Troubled Asset Relief Program in the fall of 2008, it also established the Congressional Oversight Panel to keep an eye on the Treasury 's actions, and effectiveness, in meting out TARP dollars. On April 3, COP will close up shop, as mandated in the legislation that created TARP. From October 2008 on, COP has released a monthly report on TARP actions. The 30 reports provide a compelling historical record of TARP, and of the federal government's response to the Global Economic Crisis. This final report is a comprehensive one--a summary of Treasury's efforts. And it reads as a tough-but-fair report: In order to evaluate the TARP‘s impact, one must first recall the extreme fear and uncertainty that infected the financial system in late 2008. The stock market had endured triple digit swings. Major financial institutions, including Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Lehman Brothers, had collapsed, sowing panic throughout the financial markets. The economy was hemorrhaging jobs, and foreclosures were escalating with no end in sight. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has said that the nation was on course for "a cataclysm that could have rivaled or surpassed the Great Depression." It is now clear that, although America has endured a wrenching recession, it has not experienced a second Great Depression. The TARP does not deserve full credit for this outcome, but it provided critical support to markets at a moment of profound uncertainty. It achieved this effect in part by providing capital to banks but, more significantly, by demonstrating that the United States would take any action necessary to prevent the collapse of its financial system. Some of the more interesting themes of the report include the public stigma that COP says "burdened" the Treasury Department: Because the TARP was designed for an inherently unpopular purpose - rescuing Wall Street banks from the consequences of their own actions - stigmatization was likely inevitable. Treasury's implementation of the program has, however, made this stigma worse. For example, Treasury initially insisted that only healthy banks would be eligible for capital infusions under the CPP. When it later became clear that some TARP-recipient banks were in fact on the brink of failure, all participating banks, even those in comparatively strong condition, became tainted in the public eye. Further, many senior managers of TARP-recipient institutions maintained their jobs and their substantial salaries, and although shareholders often suffered meaningful dilution, they were not wiped out. To the public, this may appear to be evidence that Wall Street banks and bankers can retain their profits in boom years and shift their losses to taxpayers during a bust - an arrangement that is anathema to market discipline in a free economy. And transparency (or lack thereof): Beginning with its very first report, the Panel has repeatedly expressed concerns about the lack of transparency in the TARP. In too many cases, especially in late 2008 and early 2009, Treasury either declined to release information that it possessed about the program or declined to require TARP-recipient institutions to reveal information about their use of taxpayer funds. In perhaps the most profound violation of the principle of transparency, Treasury decided in the TARP's earliest days to push tens of billions of dollars out the door to very large financial institutions without requiring banks to use the funds in any particular way or even reveal how the money was used. As a result, the public will never know to what purpose its money was put. Other transparency problems include Treasury's refusal to explain how it valued the stock warrants it received in exchange for its TARP investments and the joint failure of Treasury and the Federal Reserve to disclose enough details of the 2009 stress tests to permit the results to be duplicated or challenged by outside parties. Read the full report here . Here is COP Chair Ted Kaufman introducing and summarizing the final report:

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 .

In its February report, the Congressional Oversight Panel looks at the threat commercial real estate losses pose to financial stability. Between 2010 and 2014, about $1.4 trillion in commercial real estate loans will reach the end of their terms. Nearly half are at present ―"underwater"– that is, the borrower owes more than the underlying property is currently worth. Commercial property values have fallen more than 40 percent since the beginning of 2007. Increased vacancy rates, which now range from eight percent for multifamily housing to 18 percent for office buildings, and falling rents, which have declined 40 percent for office space and 33 percent for retail space, have exerted a powerful downward pressure on the value of commercial properties. The largest commercial real estate loan losses are projected for 2011 and beyond; losses at banks alone could range as high as $200-$300 billion. The stress tests conducted last year for 19 major financial institutions examined their capital reserves only through the end of 2010. Even more significantly, small and mid-sized banks were never subjected to any exercise comparable to the stress tests, despite the fact that small and mid-sized banks are proportionately even more exposed than their larger counterparts to commercial real estate loan losses. The report goes on to point out that the larger danger comes if there are widespread defaults and we see hotels, stores, and office complexes closing. All of that would have a direct negative impact on jobs. COP Chair Elizabeth Warren discusses the dangers in her monthly report: Read the full February COP report here .

This weekend marked 12 months since the Treasury Department launched the Troubled Assets Relief Program. In that time, nearly $450 billion of the $700 billion in TARP funds have been distributed. Here's a look at how much money has flowed to whom: (H/T CNN Money's David Goldman and his article TARP: Taxpayers on the hook for $200 billion .)