A single piece of paper may just be one of the most surprising and illuminating documents of the whole banking crisis.

It’s a one-page research note from an economist at Deutsche Bank, and it outlines in the clearest terms the kind of solution many bankers are looking for. The basic message: We should forget trying to get a good deal for taxpayers because even trying will hurt.

“Ultimately, the taxpayer will be on the hook one way or another, either through greatly diminished job prospects and/or significantly higher taxes down the line,” the document says.

In other words, the paper says, if the government tries to save taxpayers money, many people will lose their jobs and the whole economy will suffer.

Read it all.

The U.S. government waded deeper into the bailout of one of the nation’s largest banks Friday when it announced a deal that will give it control over as much as 36% of Citigroup’s common stock.

Citigroup shares tumbled 46% in premarket trading.

The deal will convert preferred shares that Treasury already holds in Citigroup for common shares, a shift that is designed to improve the embattled bank’s capital base, which in turn will hopefully allow it to increase its lending.

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Bill Clinton declared more than a decade ago “the era of big government is over.” With his new budget, President Barack Obama has brought it back.

Obama’s $3.55 trillion budget proposal represents a gamble that Americans are ready for the sort of change they embraced by electing him in November, including a tax increase on Americans making more than $250,000 a year.

He proposes expansion of spending on the U.S. healthcare system, on greater energy independence and on education, hoping Americans weary of paying for a raft of expensive bailouts for banks and the car industry will go along.

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President Barack Obama forecast the biggest U.S. deficit since World War Two in a budget on Thursday that urges a costly overhaul of the healthcare system and would spend billions to arrest the economy’s freefall.

An eye-popping $1.75 trillion deficit for the 2009 fiscal year is projected in Obama’s first budget. That is equal to 12.3 percent of U.S. gross domestic product — the largest share since 1945 when the country ran a shortfall of 21.5 percent of GDP.

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Devoting nearly 20% of his speech to the topic, …[President Obama] acknowledged the public loathing of bank rescue efforts. He explained the role of credit in creating and preserving jobs. And he took some requisite, and wholly justified, swipes at executives for their outrageous pay and perks. But most important, he stated unequivocally what no one in the chamber wanted to hear and what he did not want to have to say ”” that even more money might be necessary to restore the banking system to its former self.

He was right on all scores. Nothing is more important to the livelihood of Americans than getting the credit spigot flowing again. Without it, all other efforts to revive the economy will fail.

And yet, if Congress were asked today for more funds for banks, the likeliest response would be a resounding no….

But there is no valid rationale for opposing a round three if it becomes necessary.

Read it all and there is a different view here.

Former federal officials have dubbed Citigroup the “Death Star,” comparing the bank’s threat to the financial system with the planet-destroying super weapon in the “Star Wars” movies. Privately, in the words of one official, they regard the banking giant as “unmanageable.”

—From a front page Wall Street Journal story this morning

President Obama has concentrated enormous power on a few aides in the West Wing of the White House. These aides are unrolling a rapid string of plans: to create 3 million jobs, to redesign the health care system, to save the auto industry, to revive the housing industry, to reinvent the energy sector, to revitalize the banks, to reform the schools – and to do it all while cutting the deficits in half.

If ever this kind of domestic revolution were possible, this is the time and these are the people to do it. Yet they set off my Burkean alarm bells.

I fear that in trying to do everything at once, they will do nothing well. I fear that we have a group of people who haven’t even learned to use their new phone system trying to redesign half the U.S. economy.

I fear they are going to try to undertake the biggest administrative challenge in American history while refusing to hire the people who can help the most: agency veterans who are registered lobbyists.

I worry that we’re operating far beyond our economic knowledge.

Read it all.

These are difficult times for economic policy makers, especially given what the new Administration inherited. But after five weeks of watching the repeated muffs of the Obama financial team, we’re inclined to recall Casey Stengel’s famous crack about the 1962 New York Mets: “Can’t anyone here play this game?”

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The real question is why the Obama administration keeps coming up with proposals that sound like possible alternatives to nationalization, but turn out to involve huge handouts to bank stockholders.

For example, the administration initially floated the idea of offering banks guarantees against losses on troubled assets. This would have been a great deal for bank stockholders, not so much for the rest of us: heads they win, tails taxpayers lose.

Now the administration is talking about a “public-private partnership” to buy troubled assets from the banks, with the government lending money to private investors for that purpose. This would offer investors a one-way bet: if the assets rise in price, investors win; if they fall substantially, investors walk away and leave the government holding the bag. Again, heads they win, tails we lose.

Why not just go ahead and nationalize? Remember, the longer we live with zombie banks, the harder it will be to end the economic crisis.

Read it all.

The government faced mounting pressure on Monday to put billions more in some of the nation’s biggest banks, two of the biggest automakers and the biggest insurance company, despite the billions it has already committed to rescuing them.

The government’s boldest rescue to date, its $150 billion commitment for the insurance giant American International Group, is foundering. A.I.G. indicated on Monday it was now negotiating for tens of billions of dollars in additional assistance as losses have mounted.

Separately, the Obama administration confirmed it was in discussions to aid Citigroup, the recipient of $45 billion so far, that could raise the government’s stake in the banking company to as much as 40 percent.

The Treasury Department named a special adviser to work with General Motors and Chrysler, two of Detroit’s biggest automakers, which are seeking $22 billion on top of the $17 billion already granted to them.

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The Obama administration will begin taking a hard look at the financial condition of the country’s 20 biggest banks this week to judge whether they could hold up even if the downturn worsens further than policy makers already expect.

These reviews of the banks’ books, known as “stress tests,” are heightening a dilemma for Obama aides about how candid they should be about the health of banks like Citigroup and Bank of America. The tests are expected to take several weeks.

Bank shares were pummeled last week, partly out of deepening fear that the government might nationalize some of the banks. Officials consider many of the top 20 banks “too big to fail.”

The stress tests come as anxiety grows among investors and industry analysts about the U.S. Treasury Department’s broader plans to shore up the overall banking system. People familiar with the plan, which has been criticized by industry executives and analysts as vague, say its crucial details may not be ready for another few weeks.

Read it all.

Mr. [Nouriel] Roubini tells me that bank nationalization “is something the partisans would have regarded as anathema a few weeks ago. But when I and others put it in the context of the Swedish approach [of the 1990s] — i.e. you take banks over, you clean them up, and you sell them in rapid order to the private sector — it’s clear that it’s temporary. No one’s in favor of a permanent government takeover of the financial system.”

There’s another reason why the concept should appeal to (fiscal) conservatives, he explains. “The idea that government will fork out trillions of dollars to try to rescue financial institutions, and throw more money after bad dollars, is not appealing because then the fiscal cost is much larger. So rather than being seen as something Bolshevik, nationalization is seen as pragmatic. Paradoxically, the proposal is more market-friendly than the alternative of zombie banks.”

In any case, Republicans must now temper their reactions, he says. “The kind of government interference in the economy that we saw in the last year of Bush was unprecedented. The central bank — supposed to be the lender of the last resort — became the lender of first and only resort! With our recapitalizing of financial institutions, and massive government intervention in the markets, we’ve already crossed a significant bridge.”
So, will the highest level of government be receptive to the bank-nationalization idea? “I think it will,” Mr. Roubini says, unhesitatingly. “People like Graham and Greenspan have already given their explicit blessing. This gives Obama cover.” And how long will it be before the administration goes in formally for nationalization? “I think that we’re going to see the policy adopted in the next few months . . . in six months or so.”

Read it here or you may also find it there.

Well worth the time–just under 40 minutes.

US banking shares hit their lowest level since 1992 on Thursday as fears mounted that the government would be forced to nationalise a key institution.

Further heavy selling of key names ”“ Bank of America and Citigroup were once again among the worst performing, down 14 per cent to $3.93 and 13.8 per cent to $2.51, respectively ”“ helped push the Dow Jones Industrial Average to its lowest level in six years.

Shares in several regional banks also sustained heavy losses as the S&P financial index dropped 5.2 per cent to its lowest level since 1995.

“Every time someone mentions the word [nationalisation] then investors shiver ”“ and with good reason,” said Marc Pado, chief market strategist at Cantor Fitzgerald. “There’s a lot of angst over what [US Treasury Secretary] Geithner’s going to propose.”

Read it all.

The holding companies seem to have invested most of their TARP money in their other businesses or else retained the option to do so by keeping it in deposit accounts, even as the capital of their banks decreased. At the same time the banks, which provide the majority of loans to large corporate borrowers, drastically reduced lending to new borrowers.

It’s easy to see why holding companies would withhold capital from their troubled banks. If a bank is insolvent – as many are now believed to be – and the government has to take it over, the holding company loses any capital it gave to the bank. Rather than take that risk, the holding company can opt to spend its money elsewhere, perhaps on trading of its own.

But this is not a good use of scarce capital. We might end up with too much of this proprietary trading and too little lending. It also means that when it comes time to recapitalize banks there is a bigger hole to fill, and when banks fail there is less capital available to meet the government’s obligations to insured depositors and other creditors.

Keeping money at the holding company may benefit its shareholders, but it is costly for taxpayers.

Bailouts, at the very least, should reach their target.

Read it all.

The US government may have to nationalise some banks on a temporary basis to fix the financial system and restore the flow of credit, Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, has told the Financial Times.

In an interview, Mr Greenspan, who for decades was regarded as the high priest of laisser-faire capitalism, said nationalisation could be the least bad option left for policymakers.

”It may be necessary to temporarily nationalise some banks in order to facilitate a swift and orderly restructuring,” he said. “I understand that once in a hundred years this is what you do.”

Read it all in the FT (subscription required).

It seems like politicians for months have been throwing around numbers in the billions and saying that unless the government acts right now everything will get worse. What is going on?

The economic system was hit was a flurry of crises at roughly the same time, and there isn’t a single solution to all of the problems, even though they are connected.

What is the housing crisis?

Both political parties have supported the idea that individuals should own their own homes. But in pursuing that goal, some financial institutions lent money to people who could not afford the long-term commitment, which often included rising interest rates after an initial period of low payments. Critics complain that a variety of financing vehicles snared people into impossible situations, especially as prices of homes fell and the monthly mortgage payment rose.

Read it all.

The U.S. banking system is close to being insolvent, and unless we want to become like Japan in the 1990s — or the United States in the 1930s — the only way to save it is nationalization.

As free-market economists teaching at a business school in the heart of the world’s financial capital, we feel downright blasphemous proposing an all-out government takeover of the banking system. But the U.S. financial system has reached such a dangerous tipping point that little choice remains. And while Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s recent plan to save it has many of the right elements, it’s basically too late.

The subprime mortgage mess alone does not force our hand; the $1.2 trillion it involves is just the beginning of the problem. Another $7 trillion — including commercial real estate loans, consumer credit-card debt and high-yield bonds and leveraged loans — is at risk of losing much of its value. Then there are trillions more in high-grade corporate bonds and loans and jumbo prime mortgages, whose worth will also drop precipitously as the recession deepens and more firms and households default on their loans and mortgages.

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Some of the large banks in the United States, according to economists and other finance experts, are like dead men walking.

A sober assessment of the growing mountain of losses from bad bets, measured in today’s marketplace, would overwhelm the value of the banks’ assets, they say. The banks, in their view, are insolvent.

None of the experts’ research focuses on individual banks, and there are certainly exceptions among the 50 largest banks in the country. Nor do consumers and businesses need to fret about their deposits, which are insured by the U.S. government. And even banks that might technically be insolvent can continue operating for a long time, and could recover their financial health when the economy improves.

But without a cure for the problem of bad assets, the credit crisis that is dragging down the economy will linger, as banks cannot resume the ample lending needed to restart the wheels of commerce. The answer, say the economists and experts, is a larger, more direct government role than in the Treasury Department’s plan outlined this week.

Read it all.

It’s taken so long to get all this stuff on the balance sheets of these banks, it’s going to take a long time to get it off.

—Anthony Conroy, head equity trader for BNY ConvergEx in a CBS Marketwatch article today

Yet even if President Obama gets the stimulus spending just right, the economy could still be sandbagged by a collapsed banking system. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s plan is far too complex, and too much of a gift to Wall Street. Judging by the initial verdict of Tuesday’s financial markets, the plan might well fall of its own weight.

Geithner’s plan basically tries to paper over the fact that several of America’s biggest banks are insolvent in the absence of taxpayer bailouts. It attempts to restart the same system of excessive loan securitization that caused the crash ”” this time with guarantees or loans by the Treasury or Federal Reserve. Many details have not been released, because the Treasury has not figured out how this can work.

The taxpayers have already effectively bought much of the banking system. It would be far cleaner and more efficient for government to acknowledge that, take over the large banks, clean out their balance sheets, and then sell healthy banks back to private industry.

Read it all.

Leave it to a brainy Indian to come up with the cheapest and surest way to stimulate our economy: immigration.

“All you need to do is grant visas to two million Indians, Chinese and Koreans,” said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express newspaper. “We will buy up all the subprime homes. We will work 18 hours a day to pay for them. We will immediately improve your savings rate ”” no Indian bank today has more than 2 percent nonperforming loans because not paying your mortgage is considered shameful here. And we will start new companies to create our own jobs and jobs for more Americans.”

While his tongue was slightly in cheek, Gupta and many other Indian business people I spoke to this week were trying to make a point that sometimes non-Americans can make best: “Dear America, please remember how you got to be the wealthiest country in history. It wasn’t through protectionism, or state-owned banks or fearing free trade. No, the formula was very simple: build this really flexible, really open economy, tolerate creative destruction so dead capital is quickly redeployed to better ideas and companies, pour into it the most diverse, smart and energetic immigrants from every corner of the world and then stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat.”

While I think President Obama has been doing his best to keep the worst protectionist impulses in Congress out of his stimulus plan, the U.S. Senate unfortunately voted on Feb. 6 to restrict banks and other financial institutions that receive taxpayer bailout money from hiring high-skilled immigrants on temporary work permits known as H-1B visas.

Read it all.

“I don’t call this a plan; it’s a tease,” said Bert Ely, principal at bank consultant Ely & Co. Ely said that among other things, he was nervous about how the government will handle the sales of assets. “The devil’s in the details, but the details weren’t there.”

—From this morning’s USA Today

Read it all.

Yesterday’s announcement ducked the central question of how to value the toxic assets. It is an issue that confounded Mr Geithner’s predecessor Hank Paulson, who ditched a plan for the government to buy assets directly, instead focusing on direct capital injections for the banks.

The Treasury said its programme would be “designed with a public-private financing component, which could involve putting public or private capital side-by-side and using public financing to leverage private capital”. The involvement of private-sector money would mean the government was not setting the price, it added. The exact mechanism, though, could take weeks to decide. Joseph Lavorgna, an economist at Deutsche Bank, said: “It is not big enough. There are few details. The administration is trying to buy time and they don’t get the fact that we need to get something yesterday.”

Tony Crescenzi, an analyst at Miller Tabak & Co, said: “It remains extremely uncertain how the Treasury will entice investors to do something they have been avoiding since the start of the crisis.”

The dilemma is that pricing the assets too low could make many big banks insolvent, while pricing them above market value means taxpayers handing a no-strings-attached subsidy to lenders.

Read it all.

Has Barack Obama’s presidency already failed? In normal times, this would be a ludicrous question. But these are not normal times. They are times of great danger. Today, the new US administration can disown responsibility for its inheritance; tomorrow, it will own it. Today, it can offer solutions; tomorrow it will have become the problem. Today, it is in control of events; tomorrow, events will take control of it. Doing too little is now far riskier than doing too much. If he fails to act decisively, the president risks being overwhelmed, like his predecessor. The costs to the US and the world of another failed presidency do not bear contemplating.

What is needed? The answer is: focus and ferocity. If Mr Obama does not fix this crisis, all he hopes from his presidency will be lost. If he does, he can reshape the agenda. Hoping for the best is foolish. He should expect the worst and act accordingly.

Yet hoping for the best is what one sees in the stimulus programme and ”“ so far as I can judge from Tuesday’s sketchy announcement by Tim Geithner, Treasury secretary ”“ also in the new plans for fixing the banking system. I commented on the former last week. I would merely add that it is extraordinary that a popular new president, confronting a once-in-80-years’ economic crisis, has let Congress shape the outcome.

Read it all (subscriber only).

The gravity of the financial crisis confronting the Obama administration will come into stark focus today when officials unveil a three-pronged rescue program that may commit up to $1.5 trillion in public and private funds, and possibly more, lawmakers and other officials said.

In announcing the plan, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner will not ask Congress for more funds than the roughly $350 billion that remain in the Treasury Department’s original rescue package for the financial system, though congressional sources said such a request could come later if the new programs are unsuccessful. The rest of the money would come from other government agencies, such as the Federal Reserve, as well as private-sector contributions.

A senior administration official warned last night that the ultimate cost to taxpayers has not been determined. Several of the programs have not been finalized, and most are designed to ultimately return money to taxpayers.

Geithner plans to announce a public-private partnership that would seek to finance the purchasing of toxic bank assets that are at the heart of the credit crisis, officials and congressional sources said. These sources briefed by Treasury officials said the program may initially raise $250 billion to $500 billion in public and private funds to offer low-cost financing to encourage investors to buy the toxic assets. An administration official said the proposal is still subject to a public review and may not take final shape for several weeks.

Read it all.

President Obama took his case for his $800 billion economic recovery package to the American people on Monday, as the Senate cleared the way for passage of the bill and the White House prepared for its next major hurdle: selling Congress and the public on a fresh plan to bail out the nation’s banks.

Warning that a failure to act “could turn a crisis into a catastrophe,” Mr. Obama used his presidential platform ”” a prime-time news conference, the first of his presidency, in the grand setting of the White House East Room ”” to address head on the concerns about his approach, which has by and large failed to win the Republican support he sought.

“The plan is not perfect,” Mr. Obama said in an eight-minute speech before taking reporters’ questions. “No plan is. I can’t tell you for sure that everything in this plan will work exactly as we hope, but I can tell you with complete confidence that a failure to act will only deepen this crisis.”

The news conference was the centerpiece of an intense and highly orchestrated campaign by the administration to wrest control of the stimulus debate from Republicans and reframe it on Mr. Obama’s terms.

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The Obama administration’s new plan to bail out the nation’s banks was fashioned after a spirited internal debate that pitted the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, against some of the president’s top political hands.

In the end, Mr. Geithner largely prevailed in opposing tougher conditions on financial institutions that were sought by presidential aides, including David Axelrod, a senior adviser to the president, according to administration and Congressional officials.

Mr. Geithner, who will announce the broad outlines of the plan on Tuesday, successfully fought against more severe limits on executive pay for companies receiving government aid.

Read it all.

The logic is simple. Many (probably most, possibly all but a handful) high-profile, large border-crossing universal banks in the north Atlantic region are dead banks walking – zombie banks kept from formal insolvency only through past, present and anticipated future injections of public money. They have indeterminate but possibly large remaining stocks of toxic – hard or impossible to value – assets on their balance sheets which they cannot or will not come clean on.

This overhang of toxic assets acts like a tax on new lending. Banks are required, by regulators or by market pressures, to hoard capital and liquidity rather than engaging in new lending to the real economy. The public financial support offered in the form of capital injections (in the US mainly through preference shares and other non-voting equity), guarantees for assets and for liabilities (old and new), insurance of toxic assets (as provided to Citigroup by the US sovereign) and possibly in the future through direct purchases by the state of toxic assets (using TARP money in the US) and the creation of one or more publicly owned ”˜bad banks’ has been a complete failure.

The bad bank proposals the Obama administration and other governments are considering are non-starters, for the simple reason that they require the valuation of assets whose true value (even on a hold-to-maturity basis) can only be guessed at. The good bank proposal only requires the valuation of those assets on the balance sheets of the existing banks that are easy to value: transparently valued assets. The toxic stuff is left on the balance sheet of the existing banks, which become the legacy bad banks.

Read it all.