One of the oversight bodies created by the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) legislation is the Congressional Oversight Panel. The panel -- composed of five members appointed by Congressional leadership -- has only recently been named, but has held briefings with Treasury Department officials.

The panel's first report, due Dec. 10, will "[lay] out the central questions that Treasury should be addressing as it spends the taxpayers' money." While this seems elementary, the panel's chair, Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren, believes that Treasury has been shoveling cash -- some $242 billion so far -- into the financial system without a real strategy.

"You can't just say, 'Credit isn't moving through the system,' " she said in her first public comments since being named to the panel. "You have to ask why."

If the answer is that banks do not have money to lend, it would make sense to push capital into their hands, as the Treasury has been doing over the last two months, [Warren] continued. But if the answer is that their potential borrowers are getting less creditworthy with each passing day, "pouring money into banks isn't going to fix that problem," she said.

This sort of criticism might have been more effective a few hundred billion dollars ago (never mind before Congress handed $700 billion to the Treasury Department). Rather than put oversight mechanisms in place before handing out wads of cash to banks, Congress chose to dither and wait until a good chunk of change walked out the door before asking questions.

And speaking of oversight, the TARP Inspector General post remains vacant because a Senator (from Kentucky, perhaps?) has put an anonymous hold on his nomination. So not only was the president late in naming his nominee, but now the Senate gets to stand by, blindfolded, as a torrent of Benjamins pour out of the Treasury, because one of their colleagues has unilaterally decided to keep TARP from better oversight.

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