Defending Tim Geithner
Wall Street loved the new Treasury secretary but hated his bank-rescue plan. I see it just the other way around.By James J. Cramer Published Feb 12, 2009
This time Geithner spoke, not through his journalistic minions or Wall Street acolytes, but on national television, telling people the sobering reality of what has yet to be done to save the system. The verdict? A near 5 percent decline in the averages, the worst bludgeoning of the year.
And you know what’s ironic? I think that with this plan, he’s actually got it right. The press, the pols, the Wall Streeters—they are all dumping their golden boy just when he’s figured out how to solve the most intractable set of financial woes since the ones that landed on FDR’s desk 76 years ago.
Let’s take a moment to review the mess Geithner inherited. Having been gut-shot by the mortgage-backed-securities disaster, the nation’s banks desperately need to be recapitalized in order to help money flow the way they’re supposed to. The banks also need someone to buy up the bad paper that’s still on their books so that any infusion of new capital doesn’t go up in smoke.
Accomplishing those goals will cost trillions, and someone, of course, has to pay for it. That someone is either private investors or the federal government—taxpayers. Of course, you could also let banks fail. Geithner’s plan is a deft mix of all three ideas that allows the worst banks to go under while distributing the cost of saving the rest among taxpayers and private investors.
Geithner knows there are only really two viable options left to us.
In the first, the U.S. basically forces every bank to write down its bad loans and creates a so-called bad bank to buy up those loans on the cheap, causing mass bank failures and a nationalization of the banking system. Allowing Lehman to crater demonstrated the wisdom of allowing major failures. Deep-sixing toxic paper into a bad bank would cost taxpayers 5, 6, maybe 7 trillion dollars, as we eat (and overpay for) every bank’s rotten loans. And never mind the philosophical questions about nationalizing banks in a capitalist society; the government—the same people who manage Amtrak and the Postal ¬Service—would be left to manage the banks. I know others see nationalization as an inevitability. I see it as a catastrophe.
In the second option, the Geithner plan, we try to figure out which banks are worth saving, we tide them over by giving them capital, and we forbear—we look the other way for a time—regarding their capitalization problems until the nation finds its financial footing and those banks are solid again. The taxpayer pays some of the bill up front—hundreds of billions, actually—but the cost is much lower to each of us than it would be if we nationalized the major banks and crafted a toxic bank for their crummy loans. Meanwhile, we place restrictions on how banks use taxpayer dollars (limit excessive executive pay, encourage lending over hoarding), and eventually, when the economy and the banks recover, they’ll be able to repay the government. Yes, the details remain to be worked out, but the principles are sound.
http://nymag.com/news/businessfinance/bottomline/54304/ 
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