Expected TARP Cost: $25 Billion

The estimated cost of TARP falls again:

TARP expected to cost U.S. only $25 billion, CBO says, by Lori Montgomery, Washington Post: The Troubled Asset Relief Program, which was widely reviled as a $700 billion bailout for Wall Street titans, is now expected to cost the federal government a mere $25 billion...

A new report released Monday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that the cost of the program, known as TARP, has plummeted... "Clearly, it was not apparent when the TARP was created two years ago that the cost would turn out to be this low," the CBO report says. ...

The TARP was conceived in the final days of the Bush administration and pushed through a reluctant Congress in less than three weeks. It is widely thought to have helped stabilize a financial sector on the verge of collapse, though it remains hugely unpopular with the public. ...

All told, $389 billion has been distributed through the TARP, which expired in October. The CBO estimates that an additional $44 billion is still waiting to go out the door, primarily to troubled insurance giant American International Group and federal mortgage programs. That would bring total TARP outlays to $433 billion, of which about half - $216 billion - has been repaid. The rest of the TARP investments, meanwhile, have become markedly less risky, according to the CBO, and in many cases even profitable. ...

While the cost of the TARP is coming in far below expectations, it is just one of several massive government programs aimed at propping up the financial industry. The Federal Reserve and the FDIC have together guaranteed billions of dollars in bank debt.