At one level, scratch that, at many levels, it’s great that a growing number of banks, even some big banks are ready to pay back their TARP money. That suggests the possibility that the price of the bailout may be much less than we originally thought and feared. So that’s great. But why should we let the banks wriggle out of the terms of the loans?
Remember, the taxpayers took a huge, huge risks loaning hundreds of billions of dollars to banks, many of which were on the brink of failure — frankly, many of them still may be, but that’s another story. In exchange we got warrants — rights to buy stock at certain price points — that would give us a big upside if everything worked out well and the banks bounced back.
Now they want us to forget about the warrants or allow them to buy them back on the cheap, just pay the money back and be done with it. From my experience, that’s not how banks deal with their customers or debtors, is it?
