Living Under A TARP

I have a lot of trouble showing sympathy towards the wife of a bailed-out financial company CEO, who writes in Condé Nast Portfolio about the downsizing of her lavish lifestyle under the salary restrictions of the TARP program: cooking in rather than eating out, slimming down parties, living within your wardrobe, watching "Law & Order" instead of the latest Met production, and flying commercial rather than the private jet, mostly to avoid getting caught living richly by a reporter.

Telling is this quote:

As you can see, being a TARP wife means, in short, making decisions according to a complex algorithm: balancing the need to look like your world hasn’t crumbled beneath you—let’s not alarm the investors!—with the need to appear duly repentant for your subprime sins. It also means we’re part of the community of more than 400 companies that have received government bailout funds, whose fall from grace has been swifter and harsher than any since Mao frog-marched intellectuals into China’s countryside.

And this one:

It wasn’t long ago that America celebrated successful companies and the people who run them. My husband, CEO of one of the biggest TARP recipients, has received more than his share of accolades (in my opinion, well deserved). But because of a few tin-eared nitwits who failed to notice that their industry was under siege, the entire country now thinks that TARP bankers are greedy incompetents dedicated to ripping off taxpayers. Fancy wastebaskets, under-the-rug bonuses, lavish junkets—these are Exhibits A, B, and C in the people’s case against Wall Street. Even the Octomom gets better press.

Here is the reality: TARP managers are scared to death. The executives of these companies are desperately trying to hold their businesses together while complying with a slew of damaging bills flooding out of Congress. My husband has battled the shutdown of the credit markets and a deteriorating business environment for two endless years without respite. He’s exhausted, terrified of losing the company, and beaten down by the constant criticism hurled at him.

Judging from the comments on this article, most people's primary response is boo-TARP'in-hoo. And she knows all this:

I get it that I may not win much sympathy. Why should I? I’m not pleading poverty. We still live in relative luxury, we can afford almost everything we need, and we aren’t facing the prospect of losing our home or having to turn to our families to support us. But we are getting squeezed.

Squeezed, yes. Yet squeezing a tomato is different from squeezing a watermelon. One still has a lot more juice left over. The cost of living and the cost of living it up are not one in the same.

I know a lot of you are reveling in this, watching the rich "get theirs." No doubt you would love to see this woman walking down Fifth Avenue in a dingy eastern-European peasant dress and kerchief, head bowed low in humility, the climax of an inverted Cinderella story where regular folks live happily ever after and those wicked bankers roam a purgatory of rags and Ramen. Perhaps it would look like a scene from Soylent Green.

It will never reach that point, thankfully. Vengeance against the financial system in general has no place in our recovery. I wish I had the statistics to prove it, but I theorize a George Bailey exists for every Bernie Madoff. The smaller institutions who made solid loans and stayed out of the derivative and subprime markets aren't grabbing headlines. They quietly operate without need of TARP money, and they're still feeling a pinch from the tight credit markets.

For those who do take government money and complain about the restrictions on salaries or anything else, I have this question: why is it so unreasonable to accept spending conditions when you're accepting taxpayer money? We expect as much money as possible to go towards solidifying the business. Extras like corporate jets and retreats in Vegas simply do not do that. Neither does the gnashing of teeth in response to the TARP conditions, which still allow six-figure incomes the last time I looked.

Yeah, it ain't easy being a TARP wife. And it's not fair to tar and feather all bankers. But in mathematics you learn there's a standard deviation for every mean, and a lot of bailed-out burgeois are still living well above the averages. Meanwhile the averages are scrabbling the best they can without benefit of government aid, not worried about maintaining that high-gloss look. They just want food on the table, a roof over their heads, a paycheck in their bank accounts, and the company of those they love.