The first Oversight Commission report is now available. Our job is to answer two basic questions:
-What are the Treasury and the Fed doing with $500 billion of taxpayer money?
-Who is that money helping?
A few highlights from our report. 1/
toomey.senate.gov/files/document…
-What are the Treasury and the Fed doing with $500 billion of taxpayer money?
-Who is that money helping?
A few highlights from our report. 1/
toomey.senate.gov/files/document…
Our report begins with a summary of our dire economic situation -- and an acknowledgement that this crisis has hit small businesses, lower-income workers, and Black and Hispanic families particularly hard. 2/ 
The report then provides a summary of the Treasury/Fed program that the Commission is responsible for overseeing. As the report notes, the $500 billion Congress authorized will likely support several trillion dollars in lending. 3/
The report describes each of the five lending programs the Treasury and the Fed have created so far using a portion of the $500 billion Congress authorized. The agencies have already made some significant changes to the facilities, as the report spells out. 4/
One important point is that the mere announcement of the Treasury and the Fed’s plans on April 9 produced some big changes in the stock market and the bond market: stocks went up and the cost of borrowing for big companies went down. 5/
Because only one of these Fed facilities is up and running, our report (like the first report of the 2008 oversight panel) focuses on questions about the program and its design so far. Here’s a basic one: how will the agencies measure the success or failure of this program? 6/
Here’s another key question -- are these facilities better suited to bigger companies than smaller ones? If so, what are the Treasury and the Fed doing to counteract that? 7/
On the facility that purchases new bonds from big corporations with few limitations on how corporations spend that money, we ask: do the Treasury and the Fed believe the money will help stabilize the economy regardless of how companies use it? 8/
We have several questions about why the Treasury and the Fed made certain changes to their Main Street lending programs between April 9 and April 30. 9/
We aim to get answers to these and other questions in the report. I appreciate the hard work of @RepFrenchHill, @RepShalala, @SenToomey, and their teams, and I’m eager to hear your questions and comments about our report or this program. Our next report is due in mid-June. END
