Is "cash for trash" (Stiglitz) a good idea? for taxpayers, that is?

[amborin]

"Not just billions, but hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars are at stake.

The Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, is expected to announce details of the new plan within weeks. Administration and Congressional officials say it will give the government flexibility to buy some bad assets and guarantee others in an effort to have a broad impact but still tailor the aid for different institutions.

<snip>

The financial institution that owns the bond calculates the value at 97 cents on the dollar, or a mere 3 percent loss. But S.& P. estimates it is worth 87 cents, based on the current loan-default rate, and could be worth 53 cents under a bleaker situation that contemplates a doubling of defaults. But even that might be optimistic, because the bond traded recently for just 38 cents on the dollar, reflecting the even gloomier outlook of investors.

<snip>

While the government is considering several approaches to helping the banks, including more capital injections, buying or insuring toxic assets is likely to be a centerpiece. Determining the right price for these assets is crucial to success. Placing too low a value would force institutions selling and others holding similar investments to register crushing losses that could deplete their capital and make it harder for them to increase lending.

But inflated values would bail out the companies, their shareholders and executives at the expense of taxpayers, who would swallow the losses if the government could not recoup what it had paid.

Some critics of the plan warn that the government should not buy the assets, because banks will try to get too high a price and leave taxpayers holding the bag."

<snip>

<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/business/economy/02value.html?_r=1&ref=politics>



"Rubin, Geithner and Summers are hell-bent on denying the responsibility of their deregulation initiatives for the economic crisis. But the reality is that the merger of investment and commercial banks with insurance companies and stock brokers was illegal before the approval of their legislation, which reversed the Glass-Steagall Act passed under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. So, too, the newfangled financial instruments exempted from any government regulation, thanks to the Commodity Futures Modernization Act that Summers got Clinton to sign into law a month before he left office.

The reversal of Glass-Steagall unleashed the robber barons, as was freely conceded by Goldman CEO Blankfein in an interview he gave to the New York Times in June of 2007. "If you take an historical perspective," Blankfein said, gloating back then about the vast expansion of Goldman Sachs, "We've come full circle, because that is exactly what the Rothchilds or J.P. Morgan the banker were doing in their heyday. What caused an aberration was the Glass-Steagall Act."

The "aberration" being the sensible regulation of Wall Street to prevent another depression, which now seems dangerously close at hand. Since Glass-Steagall was repealed in 1999, Goldman Sachs experienced a 265 percent growth in its balance sheet, totaling $1 trillion in 2007.

What we need is an honest accounting of how we got into this mess, beginning with an investigation of the role of Goldman Sachs as the most insidious Wall Street player. But we are not likely to get that from an administration populated by Goldman's Washington allies.... "

<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090216/scheer>


"Existing empirical research has shown that providing assistance to banks and their borrowers can be counterproductive, resulting in increased losses to banks, which often abuse forbearance to take unproductive risks at government expense. The typical result of forbearance is a deeper hole in the net worth of banks, crippling tax burdens to finance bank bailouts, and even more severe credit supply contraction and economic decline than would have occurred in the absence of forbearance."


<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/02/bad-bank-assets-proposal-worse-than-you.html>

[chill_wind]

1. Cannot be overstated:

"What we need is an honest accounting of how we got into this mess, beginning with an investigation of the role of Goldman Sachs as the most insidious Wall Street player.

But we are not likely to get that from an administration populated by Goldman's Washington allies.... "