Obama’s bank bailout plan has been announced. And naturally, it is horrible. Felix Salmon has the most understandable explanation of the plan (it is his strong suit). But all you really need to know is this….
This plan is the government’s preferred solution. It decrees the TARP money to be “equity”, and then goes off to the FDIC to provide “debt”. Both of these sources of funds are US government risk capital which will be used to buy up toxic legacy assets. There’s no economic reason to make the debt/equity distinction. But there is a political reason: Congress would have to approve any more equity spending, but FDIC guarantees can be issued to an unlimited degree without Congressional approval.
The problem with this approach is that it’s needlessly expensive. What kind of yields will investors demand on FDIC-insured debt from a Public-Private Investment Fund? My guess is that they’ll be at least 100bp and possibly much more than that more than the yields on Treasury bonds. But because of all the political sillybuggery involved here, the government can’t just issue debt to fund this program, and needs to come up with a way of pretending that it’s in fact Public-Private Investment Fund debt being issued with no more than an FDIC guarantee. (I think that the FDIC will not charge any money for this guarantee, but that’s unclear.)
Mr. Salmon has lot more details that are worth reading. But just from the above you should be able to figure out how messed up the plan is. It is one big shell game. But that is not what has me in shock.
Instead, I am nearly in faint because Paul Krugman is leading the charge against this plan and doing a good job to boot. This is just a sample….
The Obama administration is now completely wedded to the idea that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the financial system — that what we’re facing is the equivalent of a run on an essentially sound bank. As Tim Duy put it, there are no bad assets, only misunderstood assets. And if we get investors to understand that toxic waste is really, truly worth much more than anyone is willing to pay for it, all our problems will be solved.
To this end the plan proposes to create funds in which private investors put in a small amount of their own money, and in return get large, non-recourse loans from the taxpayer, with which to buy bad — I mean misunderstood — assets. This is supposed to lead to fair prices because the funds will engage in competitive bidding.
But it’s immediately obvious, if you think about it, that these funds will have skewed incentives. In effect, Treasury will be creating — deliberately! — the functional equivalent of Texas S&Ls in the 1980s: financial operations with very little capital but lots of government-guaranteed liabilities. For the private investors, this is an open invitation to play heads I win, tails the taxpayers lose. So sure, these investors will be ready to pay high prices for toxic waste. After all, the stuff might be worth something; and if it isn’t, that’s someone else’s problem.
And that’s just the start. He has been hammering away with succeeding blog posts.
