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US debates bailout as crisis worsens
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BY: ASIM ERDİLEK:




The US Treasury’s sweeping bailout plan hastily presented to the US Congress last Monday to end the global financial crisis has unleashed a furious debate, stalling congressional approval of the plan.

This welcome debate, after Congress commendably refused to give the Treasury a blank check, was waged over the plan’s potential winners and losers as well as about its effectiveness in ending the crisis, which continued to worsen last week. As a result of the often acrimonious debate in the marathon congressional negotiations, the Treasury had to agree to several substantive changes in its initial financial rescue plan, which was to last two years and to require up to $700 billion in taxpayers’ money. A newly assertive Capitol Hill proved its mettle by not allowing the Bush administration to push it into rubber stamping such a critical, costly and initially ill-conceived mega bailout proposal to avert a feared financial Armageddon.

The revised plan, called the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), was expected to be approved by congressional leaders by the end of last weekend and by Congress early this week. It might help to lessen the severity of the financial crisis by letting troubled financial institutions get rid of their illiquid and distressed assets, but it will not solve their other critical problem of equity capital deficiency, requiring recapitalization. In fact, solving the first problem could exacerbate the second. The bailout will also not stop falling home prices, which is the root cause of the housing crisis -- i.e., rising mortgage defaults and foreclosures -- that has developed into the global financial crisis. Moreover, the Treasury’s intention to have other countries affected by the financial crisis come up with similar bailout plans of their own is unlikely to prove successful, whether or not foreign-owned financial institutions operating in the US are covered by the US plan.

The heated debate on the bailout plan (see last week’s column, “Uncle Sam to try cutting the Gordian knot”) occurred at different levels, drawing in politicians, including President Bush and the two presidential candidates, Senator John McCain and Senator Barack Obama, economists, journalists, business leaders and a surprisingly large number of angry and frustrated constituents, who called or wrote to their representatives in Washington to protest the bailout of Wall Street by Main Street. In fact, much of the debate in Congress reflected the opposition to the bailout plan by the majority of the US public, which clearly saw that it would privatize the gains but socialize the losses from the crisis, potentially costing the US taxpayers billions of dollars. The arguments by the architects of the bailout plan that the public would fare even worse in a deep depression that would be caused by the collapse of the financial system did not prove to be persuasive. President Bush’s prime time national TV address defending the bailout was ineffective.

Within Congress itself, the most vociferous opposition to the original Treasury plan to purchase toxic mortgage-related securities by spending up to $700 billion came surprisingly from Republican members. Many of them, especially in the House of Representatives, openly rebelled -- on both ideological grounds and political concerns about their re-electability next November -- against their congressional leaders and against the unpopular lame-duck Republican president who supported the plan. Protesting the violation of the “free market principles” under the original plan, which some of them labeled “trickle-down communism,” they proposed an alternative scheme that would have provided premium-based government insurance for bad loans to troubled financial institutions to help them get back on their feet. This insurance program proposed to replace the Treasury’s bailout plan did not get very far, although some of its elements could be included as an option in the finalized package.

The Democrats, on the other hand, supported the Treasury plan in principle but, after loudly blaming the administration for the global financial crisis, forced the plan to be revised significantly to include broad congressional oversight, gradual release of the $700 billion in tranches, audits and transparency to prevent abuse and waste, safeguards against conflicts of interest and concessions to Main Street in terms of caps on the compensation of the executives of troubled financial institutions that would sell their rotten securities to the government. The Treasury also agreed in principle to the demands of Congress that Uncle Sam should receive mandatory equity warrants toward a partial ownership stake in the troubled financial institutions whose toxic mortgage-related securities it would buy in reverse auctions. It seems, however, that the Democrats could not persuade Republicans, as part of the bailout package, to allow judges to rewrite mortgages to enable bankrupt homeowners to avoid foreclosure. Although Democrats control both houses of Congress, they understandably do not want to approve the bailout, which is opposed by most of the US public and is perceived as politically lethal, without Republican support.

In the first of the three presidential debates last Friday, McCain and Obama both voiced general support for the bailout, although they disagreed on who was to blame for the crisis. However, even after being pressed repeatedly by the debate’s moderator, they failed to specify how after becoming president they would deal with the costly consequences of the bailout. Prior to the debate both had become conspicuously involved in the congressional negotiations, following the impetuous insistence of “maverick” Senator McCain, who even wanted to postpone Friday’s debate presumably to give his full attention to the bailout, after having briefly suspended his campaign to that end. Senator Obama reminded his rival -- whose blatant injection of presidential politics into the bailout debate raised questions about his judgment -- that presidents should be able to multitask.

As the bailout debate raged last week, the financial crisis continued to worsen and the prospects for the US real economy deteriorated. We witnessed the collapse of Washington Mutual Inc. (WaMu), the largest bank failure in US history, which the proponents of the bailout argued should help Congress focus on the urgency of government intervention to avoid a total collapse of the US financial system akin to that of the 1930s. After losing $16.7 billion in deposits in 10 days, WaMu, with assets of $307 billion but deposits of $188 billion, was seized by the government. JP Morgan Chase & Co. bought the bulk of WaMu’s assets for $1.9 billion, with a $31 billion write-down for the toxic securities. Two other major banks, Wachovia Corp. and National City Corp., came under increasing pressure as their share prices plummeted.

The era of independent investment banking came to an end last week. Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, the only major US investment banks left in the devastation of the financial crisis, became bank holding companies. As commercial banks, they will broaden their funding base by taking deposits in order to survive but at the price of being regulated by the Federal Reserve Bank and earning lower returns. Also, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began investigating possible fraud by four of the financial institutions deeply embroiled in the financial crisis, the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, insurance giant AIG, which were all bailed out by the government earlier this month, and the investment bank Lehman Brothers, which went bankrupt.

As for the bad news about the real economy, the Department of Commerce revised downward its earlier 3.3 percent annual real gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate for the second quarter to 2.8 percent. It reported that in August orders for durable manufactured goods dropped by 4.5 percent, with new home sales falling by 11.5 percent to the lowest level in 17 years. It also reported that sales of single-family homes shrank by 11.5 percent in August to its lowest seasonally adjusted annual rate since January 1991, with the median price of a new home falling by 6.2 percent since August 2007. The US Department of Labor reported that new claims for unemployment benefits jumped in the previous week to their highest level in seven years, following the rise of the national unemployment rate in August to 6.1 percent, its highest level in five years. It seems increasingly likely that real GDP will shrink in the last quarter of this year and the first quarter of 2009, saddling the US economy with an output recession as well as a jobs recession. The global financial crisis has already begun to take a serious toll on the US real economy. As I concluded in my last column, even if Uncle Sam succeeds in cutting the Gordian knot of the global financial crisis with a mega bailout, the US, as well as the rest of the world, will have to reckon later with many unintended and unpleasant consequences, which I hope to discuss in another column.


todayszaman

September 29, 2008 | 4:53 PM Comments  0 comments

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