I can’t pretend to know or understand all the details or even the major points of the proposed financial bailout because it’s changing every moment. But from what I can gather from media reports, it looks to be a swindling of American taxpayers on a monstrous scale.
We’re going to spend, just to start, $700 billion — that’s $2,000 from every man, woman and child in the land — to buy the worst, most problematic assets from financial institutions that had made the mistake of buying them. We’re going to buy them at prices way above their market prices.
Some are saying that we’re not really losing $700 billion, because even though we’re buying these instruments at prices above what anyone will pay for them now, we’ll eventually get to sell the assets, and maybe we’ll even make a profit. Let me tell you: we’ll take a loss on that money, and it will be huge.
After the bailout, the government will be holding all these toxic mortgage-related assets. How is it going to know what it’s got, how to value it, and how to sell it? These aren’t cartons of apples, they’re some of the most complex financial instruments known to man, each instrument governed by hundreds and hundreds of pages of documents.
So who is our government going to sell them to? There’s only one group on earth that it could sell it to — the same financial institutions they bought them from.
We’ll have the biggest, dumbest, most bureaucratic institution, our US Government, trying to sell $700 billion in insanely complicated financial instruments to a group of the most sophisticated, smartest, nimblest institutions, the banks that created the damn things. Who’s going to come out ahead?
These bankers are geniuses at finding the game, understanding the rules, and figuring out a way to win. And the new game is going to be Fleece the Government.
But this huge giveaway to the investment banks is necessary, as the investment banker who is the Treasury Secretary assures us, to loosen the credit markets and save the economy. If the federal government is willing to spend $700 billion, there are other ways to loosen the credit markets, ways in which the government is more likely to get some sort of upside if things go well.
We’re told they’re going to put some “safeguards” into the plan as a compromise to those who oppose it, but these modifications will just make the rules of the game a little more interesting for the bankers. For example, the plan supposedly is going to place limits on executive compensation for the the banks that participate. These bankers are ingenious at getting around rules, but if you want to see truly mind-boggling creativity, place limits on a banker’s actual compensation, and watch the sparks fly.
At a time when the deficit is around $9.7 trillion, dragging down our currency and economy, the structuring of this deal is a disaster.