History
The original proposal was submitted to the United States House of Representatives, with the purpose of purchasing bad assets, reducing uncertainty regarding the worth of the remaining assets, and restoring confidence in the credit markets. The bill was then expanded and put forth as an amendment to H.R. 3997. The amendment was rejected via a vote of the House of Representatives on September 29, 2008, voting 205–228.
On October 1, 2008, the Senate debated and voted on an amendment to H.R. 1424, which substituted a newly revised version of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 for the language of H.R. 1424. The Senate accepted the amendment and passed the entire amended bill, voting 74–25. Additional unrelated provisions added an estimated $150 billion to the cost of the package and increased the length of the bill to 451 pages. (See Public Law 110-343 for details on the added provisions.) The amended version of H.R. 1424 was sent to the House for consideration, and on October 3, the House voted 263–171 to enact the bill into law. President George W. Bush signed the bill into law within hours of its congressional enactment, creating the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to purchase failing bank assets. TARP was dwarfed by other guarantees and lending limits; analysis by Bloomberg found the Federal Reserve had, by March 2009, committed $7.77 trillion to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.
Supporters of the plan argued that the market intervention called for by the plan was vital to prevent further erosion of confidence in the U.S. credit markets and that failure to act could lead to an economic depression. Opponents objected to the plan's cost and rapidity, pointing to polls that showed little support among the public for "bailing out" Wall Street investment banks, claimed that better alternatives were not considered, and that the Senate forced passage of the unpopular version through the opposing house by "sweetening" the bailout package.
Read more about this topic: Emergency Economic Stabilization Act Of 2008
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