Monday, March 23, 2009

The Proof of the Pudding

Is in the eating. I don't know how to make really good, gourmet pudding and I don't know how to fix the financial markets collapse.

I may think the Geithner Plan is a grand game of "Let's Pretend" where the government and "private investors" pretend that the worthless paper owned by banks has value. I may think that the "private investors" (insert the name Goldman Sachs here) are in a no-lose situation. If the paper is worthless then the government will swallow the losses while any profits will go to the investors. I may think that the only positive result of this Plan will be to make Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs CEO, the richest man on the face of the Earth.

I may think that nationalizing the banks, zeroing out the bank stockholders, fixing bank assets from within the banks, and after they have recovered returning the banks to the public (and repaying the taxpayers) by selling new stock is a better plan. But, what do I know?

As I said, I don't know how to make good pudding. If the economy recovers, then the Geithner Plan made good pudding and who am I to complain.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Best line today is to focus on the liabilities -

"a lot of these liabilities are wholly unrelated to any economic or financial activity, and are contingent rather than actual - ie nobody loses anything if they are cancelled. If a 100:1 bet you made is cancelled, your actual loss is not 100, it is 1 - something that could be paid back to you."


http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/3/23/12852/1623

A Fan from the Far North