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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:

When the Treasury introduced the Troubled Assets Relief Program late last year, the government guaranteed the values of hundreds of billions of dollars in bank assets. The move was made, to put it very simply, to prevent a panic and protect the assets of millions of American taxpayers. The Congressional Oversight Panel , in its November report, concludes that the federal guarantees did that successfully. But the report also shows that the guarantees now account for the "single largest element of the government's response to the financial crisis," and that raises some timely questions for Treasury: These guarantee programs also created significant moral hazard. Guarantees create price distortions and can lead market participants to engage in riskier behavior than they otherwise would. In addition to the explicit guarantees analyzed in the Panel's report, the government's broader economic stabilization effort may have signaled an implicit guarantee to the marketplace: the American taxpayer stands ready to provide a financial backstop for certain markets and large market players to avert possible economic collapse. To the degree that investors, lenders and borrowers believe that such an implicit guarantee remains in effect, moral hazard will continue to distort the market. The extraordinary scale of these guarantees, the significant risk to taxpayers, and the corresponding moral hazard leads the Panel to conclude that these programs should be subject to extraordinary transparency. The Panel specifically identified the guarantee of Citigroup assets under AGP -- the largest single guarantee offered to date -- and strongly urges Treasury to provide regular, detailed disclosures about the status of the assets backing up this guarantee. Treasury should disclose greater detail about the rationale behind guarantee programs, the alternatives that may have been available and why they were not chosen, and whether these programs have achieved their objectives. This should include an analysis of why Citigroup and Bank of America were selected for AGP and not others. Here is COP Chair Elizabeth Warren introducing the November report: You can read the full report here .