Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we're going to answer the question – "What was TARP?" And so, we're specifically talking about the Troubled Asset Relief Program, what is commonly referred to as TARP. And if you traded through the 2008, 2009 market meltdown, you probably heard TARP all over the place because it was meant to be the saving grace of the market, this new government program that would come in and swoop in and stabilize these financial institutions and major banks. I want to try to break it down here for you guys pretty quickly, so you understand what it was because I probably expect that we'll see this at some point in the future because it was I think in many cases, renowned as a big success and potentially on the books, maybe it was a success for the government to do this. It definitely averted a crisis, but I don't know if it [Unintelligible] further down the road, we're eventually going to have a bigger one out of that. But neither here, nor there, the TARP program was basically put into place around September, October of 2008. This was really at the height of the meltdown in what was the subprime mess in the beginning of the financial collapse. And so, what Paulson which was the Treasury Secretary at the time, Henry Paulson said is – "We're going to go in and the government's going to come in and they're going to buy these subprime mortgages that are illiquid." The banks have all of these subprime mortgages that they had purchased and they're trying to sell and nobody wants to buy any of these things, so what they're going to do is they're going to come in and they're going to buy these illiquid assets that nobody else wants to buy, so the government's going to buy them and take them off the books to these banks and as a result, now, the banks will have none of these illiquid assets showing and they won't have to mark them down to their market price which was effectively zero at the time, so it's a way for them to basically take all of the bad pieces of the bank and throw them into the government which in my opinion, was crazy on one hand because why should the government be involved in this anyway? But again, this, neither here, nor there, it just ended up what's happening.
The government basically came in and they said, "We can do about $700 billion of troubled asset relief purchases." And at the time, that was a lot of money and I think at the end of the day, it only ended up being in $200, $300 billion, somewhere in that neighborhood, but what's $1 billion between friends, right? And so, they ended up buying up a lot of equity percentages in companies, specifically things like AIG, NGM and Chrysler. They also came in and bought up a bunch of bonds and assets that were totally illiquid that nobody wanted from Goldman Sachs and from Wells Fargo, Bank of America, I mean, you name it, they swooped in and bought everything. And later on, all the banks ended up having to pay all this stuff back with interest which they did and many of them paid it back with interest pretty quickly because as the market recovered and as things came back to normal, they were able to buy back stock or to issue new stock and basically pay back the government. The basic premise here is that the TARP program was meant to be this swooping in of the government to save basically the capitalist system that had basically gone imploded on itself. And so, there's a lot of discussion to say – Could the markets have handled a write down of all of this stuff? Could it have collapsed the banking system? I don't know. I mean, we didn't see that play out, but I mean, there's a lot of back and forth on each side and I'm sure a lot of people listening to this, you probably have an opinion on one side or the other. The end result is for me as a trader, what I know to be true is that the government saw this as an $11 billion profit for taxpayers. In fact, that's actually what they publish in 2013 when they wrapped up their TARP program. They said that the government made basically $11 billion on the TARP program, so it was actually a good investment for the taxpayers and for the country to come in and swoop up and buy these illiquid assets and basically wait for a payoff in the future. I would fully expect that in the future, we see another TARP 2 program roll up whenever we start to see some financial distress. Whether if that's a year from now, two years from now, I would fully expect the FED and the treasury to come in and basically recreate this whole thing all over again. It was an easy pitch before and it'll be an even easier pitch in the future. Hopefully this helps out. Again, be prepared for it and as always, if you have any questions, let me know. Until next time, happy trading.