In recent days, I have been more sanguine about the partial nationalization proposal, considering it to be a somewhat improved approach given that the awful legislation has passed anyway, but Jeffrey Miron outlines why I should not have been:

Government injection of cash, however, does little to improve transparency. A bank with complicated, depreciated assets is in much the same position after the government gives it cash as it was before, since outside investors will still have limited information about the solvency of any individual bank.

Perhaps the new cash will spur the sale of bad assets, or nudge banks to reveal their balance sheets, but that is far from obvious. Banks, moreover, might remain cautious even with this increased liquidity simply because of uncertainty about the economy. Thus it is hard to know whether cash injections will actually spur bank lending.

In any event, government ownership of banks has frightening long-term implications, whether or not it alleviates the credit crunch.

Government ownership means that political forces will determine who wins and who loses in the banking sector. The government, for example, will push banks to aid borrowers with poor credit histories, to subsidize politically connected industries, and to lend in the districts of powerful members of Congress. All of this is horrible for economic efficiency.

Government pressure will be difficult for banks to resist, since the government can both threaten to withdraw its ownership stake or promise further injections whenever it wants to modify bank behavior. Banks will respond by accommodating government objectives in exchange for continued financial support. This is crony capitalism, pure and simple.

So my basic objections to concentration of power and collusion remain much what they were before.  I would not go so far as Miron in advocating a purely do-nothing approach, but on reflection it is clear this implementation necessarily has the flaws that made the bailout so objectionable.  Yves Smith has more on how Paulson delivered the staged ultimatum–that seems the best description for it–to the nine CEOs, and in another post she confirms that, despite the government’s claims that the banks must start lending this money, they are not going to be required to do anything with it.  As Smith explains, this was more of the administration’s corner-cutting, incompetence and outrageous power-grabbing at its finest: 

To make the point more clearly: the public at large was taken not just once, but twice, It was hosed in the unduly generous terms given to nine banks (the lack of writedown of assets to realistic values, the failure to wipe out current equity holders and subject debt holders to a haircut, the merely symbolic limits on executive pay). But it also got a less obvious shellacking in the way legal and regulatory processes were trampled. Given the Treasury and Fed’s combined banking authority, and the dubious valuations of many types of assets on these firms’ books, the powers that be could easily have compelled any bank to accept a much less favorable deal, or frankly any deal they wanted them to take. And it would not have taken all that much additional effort (although it might have taken some planning, which is a persistent shortcoming of this Administration). 

But Paulson instead went through a bizarre, public exercise in sham corecion (and real sidestepping of even minimal normal forms) so as to avoid a candid discussion of how lousy the banks’ balance sheets really were. And the ruse, like the TARP itself, was another demonstration that the Treasury considers itself to be outside the law.

Filed under: economics, politics