Wall Street/Washington Connection

Well, I wasn't going to do it, but I can't help showing this report from Option Armageddon, a Certified Public Accountant blogger who is quite astute. The writing's on the wall with Public Private Investment Program.

FDIC Won’t Rule Out Banks as Buyers of Toxic Assets May 27, 2009 – 6:18 pm

During a press conference today, FDIC Chairwoman Sheila Bair was asked about this morning’s WSJ report that banks are lobbying to buy assets under Geithner’s toxic asset plan, the PPIP.

She says banks will not be able to bid on their own assets, but clearly leaves open the possibility that they’d be allowed to buy the assets of other banks.

This is highly problematic. If banks can act as buyers in any capacity, what’s to prevent collusion? With just a sliver of equity and a pile of non-recourse federal loans, Citigroup could fund a special purpose vehicle to overpay for BofA’s bad assets. In exchange BofA would overpay for Citi’s assets. The beauty of using non-recourse debt is that you can walk away from it. The lender, in this case the taxpayer, is stuck eating the loss on the bombed-out asset.
All banks stand to lose is their small equity investment.

The ranking Republican member of the House Financial Services Committee, Spencer Bachus, previously expressed outrage that such collusion might be possible. He promised to introduce legislation to prevent it from happening. I’m not aware that he has and have a call in to the Financial Services Committee for comment.

Below, I’ve transcribed Bair’s full response to the question she was asked about PPIP….

"No [banks] will not be able to bid on their own assets. I think there has been some confusion about that….There will be no structure where we would allow banks to bid on their own assets. I think there have been separate issues about whether banks can be buyers on other bank assets and I think that’s an issue that we continue to look at. There’s also a question of whether banks who come to the PPIP to sell assets, while they would not be involved in the bidding process—private investors would set the prices—whether part of the consideration they would take back once the price has been set by the private sector, would be in an equity piece in the PPIP. Those are things we’re actively discussing….I think there are a couple of factors that are still at play here as we try to develop this structure and look toward the launch of PPIP. One is we’re finding on both the buyer and the seller side there continues to be discomfort about Congress’s view of this program, whether the rules could potentially change. The Boxer/Ensign amendment I think is a good amendment…it addresses conflict of interest issues and we want that too. Nonetheless I think this has created some uncertainty about certain aspects of the Boxer/Ensign amendment and the Treasury will need to issue regulations I think to clarify those issues before we will have comfort by market participants."

Bair’s sentence beginning “nonetheless” was not clear. What I transcribed is what she said. It sounds as if she’s uncomfortable about the amendment (more below)…..she quickly changes the subject…

"Also the good news is banks have been able to raise a lot of new capital before taking more aggressive steps to cleanse their balance sheets. The incentives to sell [assets to the PPIP] may be less for good reasons because they’ve been able to raise new capital.
So there are still some issues we are working through…"

She knows taxpayers are getting a raw deal, which is why it would be “good news” that banks’ have less incentive to sell assets to these vehicles. She also knows that banks are still swimming in so much toxic junk, it has to be flushed away somehow. But she’s apprehensive that the public might have a transparent view of the cleansing process.

Enter the Boxer/Ensign amendment, which is attached to S. 896. It reads:

"To provide for oversight of a Public-Private Investment Program, and to authorize monies for the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program to audit and investigate recipients of non-recourse Federal loans under the Public Private Investment Program and the Term Asset Loan Facility."

In other words, Senators Boxer and Ensign want to give Neil Barofsky oversight over PPIP in addition to TARP. Is Bair uncomfortable with this because she knows Barofsky would publicize some of the very abuses the administration is counting on to help banks push their losses onto taxpayers?

This blog entry shows the problem with the Wall Street/Washington connection. It's a lot, like an "L.A. Connection" from a Steely Dan song.

Or, it's a lot like the words from this Steely Dan song, "Kid Charlamagne":

"Clean this mess up or we'll all end up in jail, the test tubes and the scales, just get it all out of here. Is there gas in the car? Yes, there's gas in the car. I think the people down the hall know who we are."

First, in this analogy, the "mess" are the "toxic assets," the "test tubes and the scales" are the TARP programs and the other "tools" paid for by taxpayers, and the people down the hall are simply the investors and/or astute financial professionals who understand what's going on here. By the way, there won't be gas in the car soon because it'll be too damn expensive.

The song itself was about drug dealers but it can apply to Wall Street greed as well. Money can be an addiction for greedy people from Wall Street, and these "dealers" in the Obama administration enable greedy "trickle-down" economics to feed that addiction.

It just does not bode well in a change-oriented administration.