Foreign economies aided by bailout, didn't help U.S.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The $700 billion bank bailout program helped rescue overseas economies, but international bailout programs did little to help the United States in return, according to a report from a congressionally appointed watchdog group released Thursday.

"It appears likely that America's financial rescue had a much greater impact internationally than other nations' programs on the United States," begins the 162-page report, issued by the Congressional Oversight Panel, on the global impact of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

The report focused on the bankrupt insurer AIG (AIG, Fortune 500) as a prime example of how U.S. money flowed to Europe and propped up banks there, without flowing back to the United States.

The report said that banks in France and Germany were "among the greatest beneficiaries of AIG's rescue, yet the U.S. government bore the entire $70 billion risk of the AIG capital injection program."

The report said the U.S. rescue of AIG "exceeded the size of France's entire $35 billion capital injection program and was nearly half the size of Germany's $133 billion program."

TARP, a bailout plan from Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson in the final months of the George W. Bush administration, was approved by Congress and implemented after the onset of the financial crisis in the fall of 2008.

Going forward, the report said that the U.S. Treasury needs to better track the flow of overseas money and take an active role in analyzing the financial impact on the United States.

"Careful policymakers would put plans in place before the next crisis, rather than responding on an ad hoc basis at the peak of the storm," said the report.

The panel's chairwoman, Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren, is among the candidates to head the new consumer financial protection agency that was authorized in the Wall Street reform bill signed into law by President Obama last month.