A reader asks:
"Curious what your thoughts on the bailout are. Is it necessary and what do you think of its presented form?"
I definitely think something is necessary. The biggest problem I have with the plan is not the concept itself, but rather how Paulson and Bernanke have sold it to Congress and the public. The conventional wisdom on Main Street and in Congress is that we are simply writing a $700 billion check to bailout Wall Street and the rich executives who helped get us into this mess in the first place, at the taxpayers' expense. I am puzzled as to why nobody has tried very hard to explain how that is largely inaccurate.
We are not writing a check for $700 billion and getting nothing in return. That would be a bailout. Instead, we are buying distressed assets at a fraction of their notional (typo, corrected and replaced "nominal" with "notional" -CB) value. By doing so, we are converting unrealized losses on the banks' balance sheets to realized losses. How is that a bailout? The banks are going to book billions of dollars of losses by selling their assets to the government.
The whole point of the plan is to determine prices for assets where the market isn't functioning, so we know what exactly the ultimate losses on this crap are going to be. Without a market for these assets, uncertainty as to actual losses is causing worry and panic in the marketplace. If we bought assets at par, then yes, that would be a bailout because we would protect the banks from losses. All we are trying to do is quantify the losses, which is extraordinarily important.
In return, the government is getting assets that are producing real cash flow. There will be plenty of defaults, but that is reflected in the price being paid (10, 20, 30 cents on the dollar in many cases). The taxpayers are not going to lose $700 billion from this plan. We could lose some, or make some, depending on a variety of factors, but by buying assets when nobody else is willing to, the odds are high that the price paid will be very, very fair, if not a bargain.
As for plan specifics, I like the idea of a reverse auction as a price discovery mechanism. It integrates a market-based system into government intervention. The only thing I am worried about is the incentive system for banks to participate. Very few firms have sold these assets at low prices so far, and I am not sure why they would be more likely to sell to the government. With a reverse auction in place, it is not like the government can bid unreasonably high prices to coax sellers, and they wouldn't want to do that anyway since they are acting with taxpayer funds.
All in all, I like the idea but not the sales pitch. Too many people either don't understand why anything needs to be done or are misguided in their belief that all we are doing is "bailing out Wall Street." The middle class would be among the worst affected should the economy deteriorate significantly further. And anyone who thinks the government needs to leave the market alone simply is not well versed in exactly what started to happen last week, how dysfunctional the markets have become, and what could occur as a result should we just sit back and let the free market figure it out. The free market (and the greed and unethical behavior it promoted) got us into trouble in the first place.