46 Companies Behind on TARP Payments

American taxpayers may be unable to recoup their bailout money from 46 companies that had missed dividend payments to the government by the end of September. Analysts expect that many bailed-out firms will fail or struggle to repay the government in the coming months. CIT Group is under bankruptcy protection after receiving $2.3 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program. United Commercial Bank of San Francisco, which at the beginning of the month became the first to collapse under TARP, cost taxpayers $299 million. Of the TARP program, former Assistant Treasury Secretary Phillip Swagel said that "the taxpayers certainly have gotten a very strong return on many of those investments, but it's inevitable that when you invest in hundreds of institutions, some of them are going to go bad."