Replies

ex-Texan: Bernanke will have tons of future windfalls and IOUs to cash in later. All he is doing is helping his cronies steal more money. Will officials in D.C. ever wake up and realize that this was just a HUGE Wall Street Ponzi scheme _____________ ?

The answer is no. No, no, no. Everybody is getting paid off by Wall Street.

Where no Fed has gone before
Central bank's 'loan' for Bear Stearns deal faces serious scrutiny

The Federal Reserve has stretched its mandate up, down, and sideways to prevent a financial market deluge. Now it appears to be stretching the English language a bit as well. What the Fed is calling a $29 billion "loan" to help finance JPMorgan Chase's purchase of Bear Stearns looks much more like a $29 billion investment in securities owned by Bear. Although the Fed insists that it isn't technically buying any assets, in practical terms it's doing exactly that. All this adds up to a big and unacknowledged step up in the central bank's financial intervention with Wall Street investment banks.
...now that things have quieted down a bit, the Fed is likely to face some tough questions about the precise nature of its actions as well as the legal justification for them.
The second-guessing has already begun. On Wednesday, Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Chairman Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., announced an April 3 hearing to explore the "unprecedented arrangement" between the Fed, JPMorgan and Bear. Top officials from the Fed and other regulators, as well as Bear Stearns CEO Alan Schwartz and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, will likely be grilled about the details.
...So far, few people have focused on what exactly the Fed is getting in exchange for supplying $29 billion to JPMorgan Chase. That's a bit surprising because whatever the deal is, it's far from a standard loan. The strangest twist is that even though the money goes to JPMorgan, that firm isn't the borrower. So the Fed can't demand repayment from JPMorgan if the Bear assets turn out to be worth less than promised.
What's also odd is that if there's money left after loans are paid off, the Fed gets to keep the residual value for itself. That's what one would expect if the Fed were buying the assets, not just treating them as collateral for a loan. Vincent R. Reinhart, a former director of the Fed's Division of Monetary Affairs and now a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, said in an interview Wednesday: "The New York Fed is the residual claimant. That doesn't look to me like a loan. That looks like equity."
....
From an economic perspective, this complex arrangement is functionally identical to a purchase of the Bear portfolio by the Fed—one that's financed in small part by the subordinated $1 billion loan from JPMorgan. But the Federal Reserve Act doesn't seem to provide for the Fed to make such equity investments.....