Since our launch, BailoutWatch.net has tracked the latest news, events, federal reports, and other useful resources related to the federal bailout. This entry, our first official "Project Update," is meant to highlight some of the work of our Bailout Watch project partners. While the majority of the work reported in the Update is posted on this site as it is released to the public, the "Project Update" makes it easy to keep up with what organizations are doing to to research, investigate, and analyze the federal government's actions during the bailout.  "Project Updates" will be posted once every two months.

Economic Policy Institute (EPI)

EPI recently announced that it will begin hosting monthly briefings on bail-out related issues. After the forums, materials from the event will be posted on BailoutWatch.net's Expert Exchange where users will be able to comment, and panelists can continue the discussion.

The first forum, "Small Enough to Fail: Community Banks in the Bailout," will be held at 10 am at EPI on June 10. During the event, panelists William Dunkelburg, an economics professor at Temple and Chairman of the Board of Liberty Bank, a small bank in New Jersey, Karen Thomas, director of legislative affairs for the Independent Community Bankers of America, and Christopher Whalen, managing director of Institutional Risk Analysis, a private consultant that tracks banks, will examine how the government’s response so far is helping big banks at the expense of smaller banks. For more information on the issue, read Nancy Cleeland's introduction to the topic posted on our Expert Exchange.

The second forum will be held in mid-July. During this forum experts will look at the Federal Reserve, its history of secrecy and its changing role in the bailout. Confirmed panelists include: journalist Bill Greider, author of Secrets of the Temple, and Jon Faust, a former Fed economist and director of the financial economics department at Johns Hopkins.

Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)

CEPR continues to focus public and media attention on the bailout through reports, analyses, opinion pieces, testimony and blogs.  Some highlights since March:

• In March, CEPR released a research report, Investment Bank Welfare? The Implicit Bank Subsidies in the Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF) and the Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF) Created by the Federal Reserve Board, which drew attention to the trillions of dollars that the Federal Reserve has lent to banks and non-financial institutions to maintain liquidity. 

• Also in March, CEPR's co-director, Dean Baker, testified on the success of the TARP to date before the House of Representatives' Financial Institutions Subcommittee of the Financial  Services Committee and released an issue brief, The AIG Saga: A Brief Primer.

• In April, Dean's column, A Trillion Dollars for the Banks: How About a Second Opinion? appeared on Truthout and The Hill blog.  Dean also participated in BailoutWatch's first Expert Exchange.

• Early in May, Dean argued Why We Can't Wait to Move On Bank Reform in an online discussion sponsored by the Campaign for America's Future.

• Dean's recent column in the Guardian Unlimited, Waterboard the Fed?, continues the pressure to make the Federal Reserve accountable.

In his blog, Beat the Press, Dean regularly has critiqued the media's coverage of the bailout.  A recent example of his work is Background on the Stress Tests: Anyone Got an Extra $120 Billion?

CEPR is currently finishing a research paper that provides a timeline of U.S. financial regulation since the 1970s and will continue to produce opinion pieces and analyses of the bailout over the coming months.

Project on Governmnt Oversight (POGO)

On May 19, POGO sent a letter to Congress raising concerns about the serious potential for conflicts of interest involving asset managers that are being hired by the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department and calling on Congress to demand that the Federal Reserve and Treasury take a more proactive role in protecting the government from the conflicts of interest that are likely to arise from the use of private fund managers for asset management and valuation.

POGO’s letter was featured in The New York Times and The Washington Independent. As a result, several congressional offices have contacted POGO to explore working together to oversee these conflicts of interest.

In addition, POGO received thousands of pages worth of documents from the Treasury Department in response to a FOIA request submitted earlier this year, including an unredacted version of Treasury’s custodian agreement with Bank of New York Mellon.

POGO continues to post timely commentary on the POGO Blog. In just the past month, POGO has posted articles on conflicts of interest in the the Legacy Loans Program, Charlie Rose’s interview with former TARP head Neel Kashkari, and a congressional hearing which found that three of the inspectors general tasked with bailout oversight are overwhelmed with congressional mandates.

Taxpayers for Common Sense (TCS)

TCS continues to comb through disclosure reports to compile detailed biographies of bailed-out banks. The bank biographies offer a wealth of detailed information on the institutions helped by the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), and are an invaluable resource for journalists, researchers, and citizens.

Also in the past month TCS used their newsletter, the "Weekly Wastebasket" to analyze whether or not the ferderal government was getting a fair price for the stocks and warrants it purchased from banks using TARP funds.