Posted on 01/24/2009 4:34:31 AM PST by reaganaut1
WITH THE BANKING CRISIS SHOWING NO SIGNS of abating, President Barack Obama's economic team is working furiously to craft in a matter of weeks a solution that President Bush's team couldn't arrive at in over a year.
The leading plan right now is to create a huge "aggregator" bank to buy bad loans and money-losing securities from troubled lenders to keep them from failing, a gambit that likely would cost taxpayers at least another trillion dollars, and probably more. Approval of this could be the single most expensive decision the new president will make in his entire term.
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The Bush administration's TARP plan originally was designed to buy troubled assets from banks before they failed. But Treasury had a difficult time determining how to set prices and appeared to be running out of time.
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Any aggregator bank would have to address the same pricing issue that TARP never resolved. [...] The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, the main trade group for Wall Street [...] hopes the government pays higher-than-market prices for the assets.
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WILLIAM SEIDMAN, WHO RAN the Resolution Trust Corp. and now is chief commentator for CNBC, thinks the pricing issue will kill the concept of an aggregator bank.
"Japan tried exactly the same program," he points out. "The regulators wanted to pay market rates for the assets, but that would have hurt the banks, so they didn't sell."
Seidman, like Ludwig, favors a solution like the RTC. Rather than trying to save all banks, the government would let the weakest ones fail, allowing the regulators to seize the assets, not pay for them. The government would try to stabilize or sell the bad assets, while healthy banks and investors would pick up the failed banks' deposit bases.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.barrons.com ...
Yeah, with no accountability, and no way to trace the money, the CEO’s will funnel the money to foreign banks. Talk about corruption!
Bullfrog
Most Americans who have spent time in the socialist states of Western Europe come away with the impression that Europeans don’t work as hard as we do....because they don’t have to....the government takes care of them.
I hate to see it come here....but here it comes.
What a joke. IIRC, this whole "crisis" mode thing came to the forefrunt in the early fall (not that the Bush administration shouldn't have seen it coming.) Obama's been elected, so to speak, since the first week in November. He's not crafting this in a "matter of weeks"...he's been working on it for months.
“Obama’s Rush....”
I thought 0be was against Rush. Who knew 0be pwn3d him?
Obama can do in weeks what Bush couldn’t do in a year.
Taking money to send it overseas. We, the people, our governmental system, are being looted.
“Because there is no margin requirement on writing CDS it is entirely possible to set up enough Credit Default Swaps to literally consume all of the money in the banking system should they be triggered, and in fact this has occurred several times over, compelling Treasury and The Fed to write checks of infinite size to prevent the triggering of contracts that, were they to “go off”, would instantaneously destroy the currency of the United States, the entire banking system, and now that The Fed and Treasury effectively “own” these firms and their liabilities, the government itself.
It is time to put a stop to this outrageous practice by labeling it what it has become - an implicit threat to overthrow and destroy the United States Federal Government.”
“M0 has gone parabolic! Year-over-year in December 2008, it was up 98.9%! This is so shocking it defies belief. In late September as the stock panic started, it had grown by 9.9% over the past year. By October, this rate ballooned to an all-time high of 36.7%. In November, it rocketed again to 73.0%. And in December, it surged up to the staggering 98.9% you can see above. Ben Bernanke’s Fed has doubled the monetary base in a single year! Holy cow.”
http://www.zealllc.com/2009/biginf.htm
“Save the banks” - {picture of cute baby bank}
And yet, no outcry from the Left. Left + banks = 1930s europe.
0bama’s ‘compassionate socialism’???
This is ridiculous. These idiots have entered into a process that is the demonstration of the classical definition of insanity...doing the same thing over and over expecting a different outcome.
History (Political and Economic) should be required reading for all candidates for elected office.
“Obama can do in weeks what Bush couldn’t do in a year.”
What would that be? Sink the Country? Destroy the last, best hope of freedom in the world? I hope you were being sarcastic.
What exactly does “working furiously” mean? Are they so furious that they are foaming at the mouth? Or does it simply mean that they skip lunch? Or are they like George Costanza, frowning, brows wrinkled, so as to appear busy.
Maybe they are just sitting around, without a clue, trying to decide what to do next.
The Title should read:
OBAMA’S RUSH TO NATIONALIZE AMERICA’S BANKS.
Actually, I was being more than sarcastic; I was repeating what appears in the first paragraph.
My apologies.
Not just because the government takes care of them, but because the concommitant high taxes remove the incentive for individuals to work hard.
I could have been clearer and knew it right after punching the post button.
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