$5.1B in TARP funds at risk

Regulators have listed 27 of 690 financial firms that received TARP funds as failed or in serious trouble, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
Business lender CIT Group is in bankruptcy, which will erase obligations on a $2.3 billion TARP loan made in January.

Regulators also seized the banking unit of Pacific Coast National Bancorp, a San Clemente, Calif., bank on November 13. That bank accepted $4.1 million in TARP assistance.

"There are going to be more losses," banking analyst Jeff Davis at FTN Equity Capital Markets Corp. told the Journal.

Treasury Department spokesman Andrew Williams said some bad bets were inevitable.

"In a crisis such as the one we have gone through, it would not be reasonable to expect that all of the individual investments will earn profits for the taxpayers," he said.

The TARP spreadsheet includes more than 40 banks that have repaid their TARP loans.

To date, the Treasury has loaned $204.6 billion out of $700 billion authorized. More than $70 billion has been repaid, including $10.1 billion in dividends, fees and interest payments.

Copyright 2009 by United Press International.