Thursday, February 12, 2009

So Tim is working overtime to figure out some way to package them so that it's not immediately obvious to taxpayers that it's them.

From Clusterstock:

"
Why Geithner's Banking Fix Won't Work

timgeithner-obama_tbi.jpgIn the last of our series of Nouriel Roubini wisdom this morning, here's the good Doctor's explanation of why Tim Geithner's latest brainstorm won't fix the banking system. (If you don't want to miss a word of Nouriel, you can sign up to read him directly at RGE Monitor here >).

(We'll also note that Nouriel does not mention the most persuasive bit of evidence about the future failure of The Geithner "Plan": The Geithner "Plan" is the same as The Hank Paulson Plan, just bigger, and The Hank Paulson Plan didn't work. Hard to be surprised that Geithner's sticking with it, though, inasmuch as he was likely the one who created it).

The very cumbersome U.S. Treasury proposal to dispose of toxic assets - that was presented by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner... - can be best understood (subject to the large fog of uncertainty about its many details) as combining taking the toxic asset off the banks’ balance sheet with providing government guarantees to those private investors that will purchase them (and/or public capital provision to fund a public-private bad bank that would purchase such assets).

But this plan is so non-transparent and complicated that it received a thumbs down by the markets as soon as it was announced today as all major US equity indices went sharply down.

The main problem with the Treasury plan – that in some ways it may resemble the deal between Merrill Lynch (ML) and Lone Star (LS) - is the following:

Merrill sold its CDOs to Lone Star for 22 cents on the dollar; and even in that case ML remained on the hook in case the value of the assets were to fall below 22 as LS paid initially only 11 cents (i.e. ML guaranteed the LS downside risk). But today a bank like Citi has similar CDOs that, until recently, were still sitting on its books, at a deluded and fake value of 60 cents. So, since the government knows that no one in the private sector would buy those most toxic assets at 60 cents it may have to promise a guarantee (formally or informally by putting capital into a public-private bad bank that will receive extra lending from the private sector) to limit the downside risk to private investors from purchasing such assets. But that implicit or explicit guarantee would be hugely expensive if you need to induce private folks to buy at 60 what is worth only 20 or even 11. So the new Treasury plan may end up being again a royal rip-off of the taxpayer if the guarantee is excessive given the true value of the underlying assets.

And if instead the implicit or explicit guarantee is not excessive (if the public-private bank truly tries to discover the value of such assets as in the formal Treasury proposal) the banks need to sell the toxic assets at their true underlying value that implies massive writedowns that will uncover the insolvency of such banks. I.e. the emperor has no clothes and a true valuation of the bad assets – without a huge taxpayers’ bailout of the shareholders and unsecured creditors of banks – implies that banks are bankrupt and should be taken over by the government.

Once you understand this, it's no mystery why it's taking Geithner so long to develop the details of this plan. Now that the country has figured out that the whole story about "temporarily depressed market prices vs. intrinsic value prices" is just a crock designed to stick taxpayers with bank losses, it's harder to do that.

But someone has to take the losses. So Tim is working overtime to figure out some way to package them so that it's not immediately obvious to taxpayers that it's them."

Me:

Don the libertarian Democrat (URL) said:
You've got it. Here's a good post about Sweden's use of bad banks from Yves Smith:

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/02/links-21209.html

It's the Pagrotsky story:

"Furthermore, this was not a way to help private banks get rid of their troubled assets, although it is obvious that it had enormous positive side-effects on all banks. My view is that this solution was only possible because the Government was already in possession of all the assets. The hopelessly difficult issue of pricing the assets thus became unimportant. With a private owner, I don’t believe taxpayer’s money could have been used without very big subsidies that would have been totally unacceptable. Either the assets would have been transferred far above what they could have fetched on the market with taxpayers subsidizing the previous, failed owners, or the private bank would not have been helped at all. A Government sponsored bad bank for private assets is thus, I believe, a very bad idea. "

I hesitate to draw attention to it, since he's Swedish and a Social Democrat. I noted on Yves Smith's blog that I wouldn't be so foolish as to quote him. But, what the hell.

Also, your conversation here with Tom Brown was what I referred to when the Kanjorski statement came up:

http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/article/63515/Americans%27-Money-Safer-Today-as-Govt.-Guarantees-Money-Market-Funds?tickers=BAC,F,MS,mer,leh,wm,wb

I didn't see you post on this. Did I miss it?

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