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WASHINGTON — Ask a bailed-out bank about its Las Vegas retreat, its corporate jet or its evening in Beverly Hills and you'll probably get a response like this: Oh that? That wasn't taxpayer money.
But ask the same bank to account for its billions in bailout money and things get murkier. Money is fungible, they say, so once the bailout check cleared, it got mixed up with the bank's own money. Now it's impossible to separate the two piles and explain where the money went.
To some in Congress, that sounds like the banks are trying to have it both ways.
"Don't insult our intelligence," Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., told banking executives at a hearing last month.
When news broke that Wells Fargo, recipient of $25 billion in bailout money, was planning a lavish Las Vegas retreat for its top employees, lawmakers howled. The bank canceled the trip but took out full-page newspaper advertisements defending such trips.
"The funds to pay for recognition events such as these do not come from the government," the ad read. "They come from our profits."
Does that mean the bank tracks government money and profits separately? No.
Company spokeswoman Julia Tunis Bernard said Wells Fargo doesn't distinguish between bailout money and other revenue. What the newspaper ad meant, she said, is that the bank didn't need the bailout money to pay its routine operating expenses — including employee trips like the one to Las Vegas.
There's an important distinction between saying government money wasn't used to pay for something and saying the bank would have paid for it with or without the bailout.
It's a distinction Northern Trust Bank tiptoed around recently when gossip site TMZ.com reported the bank flew clients and employees to Los Angeles for live music and fine dining in connection with the bank's sponsorship of the Northern Trust Open golf tournament.
Northern Trust said in a letter posted on its Web site that it "paid for this event using normal operating funds."
Well, sort of. The bank was more accurate later in the same letter when it said it had not "allocated" money for those events from bailout money. As bank spokesman Doug Holt explained, Northern Trust would have held those events even if the bailout never occurred.
That's what North Carolina-based BB&T Corp. meant when it said it didn't use bailout money to buy a Florida insurance company. It would have made the deal regardless.
Wells Fargo, Northern Trust and BB&T are considered among the nation's healthier banks. Though it's not accurate to say they didn't spend bailout money on trips or acquisitions, they can make the case that they didn't need the bailout to cover those costs.
The bigger question is for a bank like Citigroup Inc. When it was reported in January that the company planned to buy a new private jet, Citi scrapped the plan but said it never had planned to use bailout money on the purchase.
Unlike its healthier competitors, however, without repeated government bailouts, there very well might not have been a Citigroup left to buy the plane.
