Sunday, February 08, 2009

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Finally we might get some movement on solving the bank and mortgage mess! It is about time. I've always said if the problem is really bad loans then get them out of the system and everything will be fine.

Now we here that's exactly what might happen. New Tres. Sec., Timothy Gheithner has suggested the creation of a 'bad bank'. This bank would be an aggregator used to accumulate the loans that are in default, essentially removing them from banks books and getting them out of the system.

This 'bad bank' would absorb all of the delinquent assets and turn our banks back into 'good banks' again! Stupendous. But wait, here's the ugly part, there's not enough money left in the TARP fund to buy all the bad loans.

The answer might be to seek investment capital from the private sector. With enough government guarantees on returns, that money might come flowing in fast and furious. However, the real ugly part would be if the American tax payer were to be burdened further with those guarantees.

For now all we can do is take a wait and see stance on this. This is the most logical decision to be made by the Treasury since this whole thing started over two years ago.

Let's hope Timothy 'the dodger' Geithner is right. I think he is, it's what the economist I follow have been saying for a while ....and they are all conservatives so maybe they all got it right this time.

What? 'the dodger' comment above? What's that all about? Sorry, it's just my swipe at yet another Obama appointment where the appointee had a tax problem....but that's a subject for another blog isn't it.

Sorry, back to the subject at hand. If the Secretary of Tresury is correct on this one, the fix could be in and we might see our economy improve as early as the 4th quarter of this year.

But the recovery may still be blunted if the Democrats are successfully in Porking America again with this huge, over inflated, pork barrel, pig belly so called stimulus package. Again, we will all just have to wait and see.....zzzzz.....zzzzz..... Somebody wake me up when this nightmare is over please! ;-)