From TARP to BARF

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I had CSPAN on so I wouldn’t miss the exciting beginning of the Senate Banking Committee’s hearing on the auto industry (because automakers are the new banks), and I caught the end of a White House presser. Some reporter was asking Dana Perino if maybe she should stop calling the bank bailout the TARP since it no longer was in fact a Troubled Asset Relief Program. She agreed that she should come up with a new name, but wasn’t sure what it should be.

Well now Bob Andres, chief investment strategist for Portfolio Management Consultants, has the answer. “The ‘Troubled Asset Relief Program’ should now be appropriately titled the ‘Bank Assistance Relief Fund’,” he writes in his Weekly Market Perspective.

I don’t have a problem with that. Do you have a problem with that?