They ended up----

Perhaps most disturbing of all, TARP created an implicit government guarantee for major financial institutions.

Another that I am deeply concerned about is the extent to which the current programs that Treasury advances send a signal to investors in mortgages.

The financial condition of the counterparties was not a relevant factor in the decision to see to it that Goldman Sachs and other counterparties were paid 100 cents on the dollar.

But that's three months off. As the banks we're talking about how to wind down TARP.

So, your statement here today is, the reason we're having a problem with small business lending is that you're making the money available to the small banks and they just won't come.

So, let me just, if I can, pinpoint--how can it be that we can manage to put hundreds of billions of dollars into the hands of very large financial institutions, in what was effectively a matter of days, and 14 months into TARP, we're…

TARP has been far from an unmitigated success.

Our time grows short, so we'll enter the lightning round here and try to get in at least one more question.

There are, though, real consequences to doing that, because now markets understand that you may, at any point, decide that anyone is large enough and that their debts should therefore be backed up by the U.S. taxpayers.

And we moved in----