by Deb Cupples | When I think of the various bailouts, I cannot help thinking of Bank of America, which has received tens of billions so far. It also has a building right across the street from the U.S. Treasury.
Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman is as skeptical toward Part 2 of the Great Bank Bailouts as he is about the voodoo economics of the Reagan era. He was right about voodoo economics, and he may well be right about the bailouts. Dr. Krugman writes:
"Old-fashioned voodoo economics — the belief in tax-cut magic — has been banished from civilized discourse. The supply-side cult has shrunk to the point that it contains only cranks, charlatans, and Republicans.
"But recent news reports suggest that many influential people, including Federal Reserve officials, bank regulators, and, possibly, members of the incoming Obama administration, have become devotees of a new kind of voodoo: the belief that by performing elaborate financial rituals we can keep dead banks walking.
Admittedly, I'm not sure that I agree with Dr. Krugman on one point: that the belief in tax-cut magic has been banished from civilized discourse. It was only about two weeks ago that President-elect Obama seemed to be proposing hundreds of billions in corporate tax cuts that met with many Republicans' approval.
That aside, I appreciate Dr. Krugman's explanation of why the government's current bailout plans may fail. His column continues:
"To explain the issue, let me describe the position of a hypothetical bank that I’ll call Gothamgroup, or Gotham for short.
"On paper, Gotham has $2 trillion in assets and $1.9 trillion in liabilities, so that it has a net worth of $100 billion. But a substantial fraction of its assets — say, $400 billion worth — are mortgage-backed securities and other toxic waste. If the bank tried to sell these assets, it would get no more than $200 billion.
"So Gotham is a zombie bank: it’s still operating, but the reality is that it has already gone bust. Its stock isn’t totally worthless — it still has a market capitalization of $20 billion — but that value is entirely based on the hope that shareholders will be rescued by a government bailout.
"Why would the government bail Gotham out? Because it plays a central role in the financial system. When Lehman was allowed to fail, financial markets froze, and for a few weeks the world economy teetered on the edge of collapse. Since we don’t want a repeat performance, Gotham has to be kept functioning. But how can that be done?
"Well, the government could simply give Gotham a couple of hundred billion dollars, enough to make it solvent again. But this would, of course, be a huge gift to Gotham’s current shareholders — and it would also encourage excessive risk-taking in the future. Still, the possibility of such a gift is what’s now supporting Gotham’s stock price.
Yes, that seems to be precisely what's going on. Executives have incentive to take huge risks and use creative accounting to make losses look like profits, in that said execs can rake in tons of bonus money by doing so. And if we taxpayers will simply step in and keep the companies afloat after execs took such huge risks, we're just begging them to take such risks (and engage in such creative accounting). Dr. Krugman continues:
"A better approach would be to do what the government did with zombie savings and loans at the end of the 1980s: it seized the defunct banks, cleaning out the shareholders. Then it transferred their bad assets to a special institution, the Resolution Trust Corporation; paid off enough of the banks’ debts to make them solvent; and sold the fixed-up banks to new owners.
"The current buzz suggests, however, that policy makers aren’t willing to take either of these approaches. Instead, they’re reportedly gravitating toward a compromise approach: moving toxic waste from private banks’ balance sheets to a publicly owned “bad bank” or “aggregator bank” that would resemble the Resolution Trust Corporation, but without seizing the banks first.
"Sheila Bair, the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, recently tried to describe how this would work: “The aggregator bank would buy the assets at fair value.” But what does “fair value” mean?
"In my example, Gothamgroup is insolvent because the alleged $400 billion of toxic waste on its books is actually worth only $200 billion. The only way a government purchase of that toxic waste can make Gotham solvent again is if the government pays much more than private buyers are willing to offer.
"Now, maybe private buyers aren’t willing to pay what toxic waste is really worth: “We don’t have really any rational pricing right now for some of these asset categories,” Ms. Bair says. But should the government be in the business of declaring that it knows better than the market what assets are worth? And is it really likely that paying “fair value,” whatever that means, would be enough to make Gotham solvent again?
"What I suspect is that policy makers — possibly without realizing it — are gearing up to attempt a bait-and-switch: a policy that looks like the cleanup of the savings and loans, but in practice amounts to making huge gifts to bank shareholders at taxpayer expense, disguised as “fair value” purchases of toxic assets.
"Why go through these contortions? The answer seems to be that Washington remains deathly afraid of the N-word — nationalization. The truth is that Gothamgroup and its sister institutions are already wards of the state, utterly dependent on taxpayer support; but nobody wants to recognize that fact and implement the obvious solution: an explicit, though temporary, government takeover. Hence the popularity of the new voodoo, which claims, as I said, that elaborate financial rituals can reanimate dead banks.
"Unfortunately, the price of this retreat into superstition may be high. I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect that taxpayers are about to get another raw deal — and that we’re about to get another financial rescue plan that fails to do the job." (NY Times).
Yes, that does seem likely -- and we can thank Congress and the Bush Administration for the strings-free corporate cash-grab that Bailout Part I turned out to be. Let's hope that this new Congress and the new Administration will do better by us taxpayers.
Other Buck Naked Politics Posts:
* GAO: Bailed-out Companies have Offshore Tax Havens
* Are Bailout Funds Being Misused?
* Real Bonuses Based on Fake Profits
* Cleaning up Political & Corporate Culture Could Help Economy
* Execs Made Millions While Driving Companies into Ditch
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I'm afraid I agree, Deb. It looks like we are about to get screwed again. "Gothamsgroup" has been gifted twice and still looks like a zombie bank. At least if the govt took over, we could clean up the books and start them off fresh.
Posted by: Bill | January 23, 2009 at 02:14 PM
There's a subtle point that I don't think any commentator has explained: it is possible for the same institution to be insolvent under current management and solvent under new management because of what is called the "discount rate." The discount rate is the rate of return that people expect on capital.
When the federal government takes over, the cost of borrowing of the institution immediately drops. It can refinance its liabilities much more cheaply because the discount rate of the federal government is so low that it is profitable to lend to the formerly insolvent institution. It can replace corporate paper at, say 10%, with Treasury bills at 3%. The cost of servicing those debts drops by half. Although the balance sheet is not immediately altered, since the new liability is owed to the "parent corporation" (the USG), solvency ceases to be a pressing issue... except, perhaps, for the "parent corporation."
Posted by: Charles | January 24, 2009 at 12:10 PM