If Admiral Ackbar had dyslexia, he'd say...

December 29, 2008 1:05 PM

TARP, SSFIP, EESA, CPP, TALF, MMIFF... Are you feeling overwhelmed by all the new acronyms coming out of the US Treasury Department lately? Here's a handy PDF reference guide to untangling the US government efforts to rescue banks, financial corporations, and other companies.
posted by Asparagirl (10 comments total)

What I want to know is: Why, when they added Explosives to the name of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms, did they keep the old ATF acronym, rather than changing the name to Bureau of Firearms, Alcohol, Tobacco & Explosives, so that the acronym could be the infinitely more awesome FATE?
posted by The World Famous at 1:09 PM on December 29, 2008 [3 favorites has favorites]

Thanks, this will be handy when I pour myself a bowl of Alpha-bits cereal tomorrow morning.
posted by Pseudology at 1:42 PM on December 29, 2008

::sings:: We've only just begun...

Very cool find.
posted by SeizeTheDay at 1:44 PM on December 29, 2008

They can all just consolidate as FUBAR.
posted by toma at 2:00 PM on December 29, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

So which one of these will give me a job?
posted by flipyourwig at 2:07 PM on December 29, 2008

The title of this post indicates that you need to cut back on time spent on the interwebs, specifically the Federal Asset-backed Repurchase Kontrols, aka FARK.
posted by GuyZero at 3:02 PM on December 29, 2008

There are two shops of "It's a tarp!" on the first page for google image search for "tarp" and three on the second. Also, lots of tarps.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 3:26 PM on December 29, 2008

When you think of FDR and the 1930's, you remember WPA, CCC, NRA (National Relief Administration). These acronyms stood for organizations that actually built things and gave people jobs. Tangible things and decent jobs.

All of these new acronyms? They stand for "funneling your tax-dollars to failed Wall Street hacks so they can retire before you ever do."
posted by bardic at 11:45 PM on December 29, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

All of these new acronyms? They stand for "funneling your tax-dollars to failed Wall Street hacks so they can retire before you ever do."

Unlike those dark days under FDR, America doesn't waste its precious time producing "tangible things and decent jobs" anymore. The goal of making all that stuff is just to create more wealth, right? So market efficiencies spawned by globalization have allowed us to cut out the middle-men (specifically, the middle-class), making our number one national product now simply richer rich people.

The little bit in the quoted piece below confirms something I'd heard but found hard to believe coming out of recent congressional reports on the now effectively-defunct TARP program's various splinter groups and solo projects:

The CPP is aimed at healthy institutions, and the terms of participation are intended to encourage lending.

So $250 (the amount now designated for the CPP program) of the original $350 billion authorized by congress to repurchase problem assets from troubled financial institutions is now instead being given to healthy banks, ostensibly to encourage them to lend more--though still none of them had the cojones to offer bridge loans to any of the failing automakers, forcing the creation of yet another splinter assistance program, whose acronym is still TBD?

Just for laughs, they should have worked a little harder and figured out a way to make the acronym "CCCP."

The first and only participant under the SSFIP ["Systemically Significant Failing Institutions Program"] thus far is AIG.

Heh. And then there's this acronym above (which when pronounced phonetically fittingly evokes the sound made by a deflating balloon) created especially to identify a program whose sole purpose is to bail out a company whose name is already an acronym. Couldn't they have made more efficient use of the alphabets limited bandwidth and called it the "All I Got" program, signaling both at once the name of the beneficiary of the program and the full extent of Uncle Sam's commitment to its rescue?

Holy crap, what an unholy alphabet soup.
posted by saulgoodman at 7:46 AM on December 30, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

From my brief stint at NASA: LOLUSA
Lots Of Luck Understanding Station Acronyms
posted by Monochrome at 11:26 AM on December 30, 2008