Liz Peek outed as author of “Confessions of a TARP Wife”

She calls herself a TARP wife, and offers a rare glimpse of what it’s like to be married to a Wall Street executive and former Master of the Universe who took billions in taxpayer dollars to bail out his company.

“I haven’t even looked at spring clothes,” writes the anonymous author of Confessions of a Tarp Wife in Conde Nast’s Portfolio magazine. “God forbid someone catches me out in something new. Keeping up with fashion seems somehow decadent in this new era, like getting Botox injections or catered dinners.

“Like so many others, I’m shopping in my closet. I’ve bought exactly two things this year—makeup and panty hose. If I buy a present for someone, I have the package sent to their home. I don’t want to be spotted climbing into a taxi, laden with Bergdorf Goodman shopping bags.”

No sooner did the piece appear, of course, than the scribe was outed from clues dropped in the essay as Elizabeth T. Peek, wife of Jeffrey M. Peek, chairman and CEO of CIT Group Inc. whose firm had accepted $2.3 billion from the Troubled Assets Relief Program.

Liz Peek, as it turns out, is no run-of-the-mill society doyenne. Although her public life in recent years has unfolded on the pages of the New York Social Diary, she is a woman of professional accomplishment in her own right.

Until the birth of her third child, Peek was a player on Wall Street herself, rising to become the first female partner at Wertheim Schroder & Co. Inc. and elected the first female president of the National Association of Petroleum Investment Analysts, a trade group.

And since leaving the financial world to raise kids, she has continued to dabble – big surprise here – as a writer, penning financial columns for the now-defunct New York Sun, The Motley Fool and WowOwow, the women’s online magazine.

As these things go, Confessions is more thoughtful than most such lamentations. Yes, the author (Peek has neither confirmed, nor denied her authorship) bemoans missing the opera, eating out at Bouley and shopping at Berdorf’s.

But there are also disarming moments that suggest a broader perspective.

I get it that I may not win much sympathy. Why should I? I’m not pleading poverty. We still live in relative luxury, we can afford almost everything we need, and we aren’t facing the prospect of losing our home or having to turn to our families to support us. But we are getting squeezed.

Like most Americans, we are worried about money. Our net worth is tied up in stock that is down 95 percent.

I’ve watched the skin under my husband’s eyes take on a yellowish hue, and his hair turn from gray to grayer, as he tries to lead his company through this mess. He’s up every night for hours at a stretch, and for the first time, he has health issues. For a person whose life has been punctuated mainly by success - from perennial class president and high-school sports star to Ivy League MBA - failure is the worst of all nightmares. He seems off balance, as though self-confidence were a physical ballast that he is slowly losing.

Peek writes that she, too, is angry.

But her list of villains includes not just the people who were in charge of the banks - yes, she includes her husband on her list - but also former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, for encouraging loose money policies, Rep. Barney Frank, whom she says “cudgeled Fannie Mae into supporting loans to unfit homebuyers,” and the subprime-mortgage brokers “who chased fees and ignored any accountability,” she writes.

It is, in short, a view of the economic meltdown from the perspective of a former Mistress of the Universe.

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