Yesterday, Treasury released a comprehensive report on the disposition of TARP warrants through 12/31/2009. It’s a font of fascinating information–at least for fellow TARP warrant aficionados.
Treasury apparently did quite well when it negotiated with banks that wanted to repurchase their TARP warrants. I am still a fan of auctions, but you have to give Treasury credit–they did defend taxpayer interests in the negotiations.
Treasury drove an especially hard bargain with Goldman Sachs. As shown in the following chart from the report, Goldman ended up paying much more than any of the estimates that Treasury considered:
The green line is what Goldman actually paid: $1.1 billion. The yellow lines are Goldman’s earlier bids ($600 million and $900 million). The black bars are the range of estimates from three different modeling efforts. Bottom line: Goldman overpaid.
The report has similar graphs for the other 33 firms that have repurchased their warrants; some of them paid at the upper end of the black bars, but none overshot like Goldman.
Disclosure: I have no investments in Goldman Sachs (or any TARP recipients).
You must be logged in to post a comment.