Four-Letter Word
Miller: Rolling up the TARP at Treasury.
Photo by Drew Angerer/New York Times/Redux
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Scorned and unloved, the TARP has generated a lot of sound and fury that, it turns out, really doesn’t signify much at all. That’s because David Miller (MBA ’03), the Treasury Department’s former chief investment officer for TARP, helped preside over “a steady and, so far, profitable unwinding of taxpayers’ holdings in financial institutions,” according to the New York Times (February 1, 2011). Critics had believed that little of TARP’s $700 billion in emergency funding to prop up the financial system would ever be recouped. Miller was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs when the financial meltdown of 2008 occurred. “I had felt a need to a calling — what can I do to help?” Miller said. “I always wanted to go into public service,” which he did, after writing a letter to Treasury Secretary and fellow Goldman alum Henry Paulson (MBA ’70). One Treasury project Miller has worked on was “the Capital Purchase Program, in which the government was given up to $250 billion to buy preferred shares in more than 500 banks to bolster their financial health,” the Times reported. “Mr. Miller and his colleagues pulled many all-nighters in working out the details of the program, living on Twinkies and Diet Coke from vending machines at 2 a.m.”
For Miller, who stepped down in March, it’s a job that he hopes one day will cease to exist: “I don’t want us to need another TARP again.”
