Misrepresenting the Financial Crisis: It Is Not Lack of Liquidity; It Is Insolvency and Lack of Trust

Bail Out Homeowners, Create Trust,
and Unfreeze Credit Markets

The bailout scheme imposed by the United States government misrepresents the ongoing credit crunch as a problem of illiquidity, i.e. lack of cash.  In reality, the problem is a lack of trust due to widespread insolvency in the financial market.  In such an environment of widespread insolvency and lack of trust, owners of cash rush to safety: buying treasury bills, investing abroad, or hoarding their cash, thus creating something akin to a black hole for cash--or "liquidity trap," as explained by John Maynard Keynes.

The "lack-of-cash" premise has been successfully promoted to justify extraction of more than a trillion dollars of taxpayers' money in the vain hope that it will free the banks from "troubled assets" and create liquidity in the financial markets, thereby triggering a much-needed wave of lending, borrowing, and expansion.

However, the amount of junk assets is simply too big to be rescued by the bailout giveaway.  Wall Street banks and other financial gamblers are, of course, aware of this.  And that is why they have lost faith in credit markets and in the business of lending, including lending to each other.

The fact that we now have a perfect case of a liquidity trap is explained (among others) by Professor Peter Morici of the University of Maryland:

At the banks, the national officials have provided liquidity, injected equity and guaranteed overnight and other short-term borrowing.  However, large money center banks simply are not interested in using the massive funds provided them to make sound loans to consumers and businesses on the scale needed to get the economy going.  These money center banks are no longer interested in providing liquidity to regional banks by bundling their loans into bonds for sale to insurance companies, pension funds and other fixed income investors that sit on vast pools of capital.

Despite all the evidence that the bailout giveaway would simply fall into the liquidity trap, the Treasury Department and the cringing Congress chose not to address this problem.  Yet, even the beneficiaries of the Treasury loot have acknowledged that they will most likely hoard the money to protect themselves.  For example, John A. Thain, the chief executive of Merrill Lynch, admitted, "At least for the next quarter, it's just going to be a cushion" (as quoted by the New York Times, 17 October 2008, p. B1).

Major Wall Street gamblers will of course hoard the bailout giveaway (instead of injecting it into the credit market), since the bailout plan offers no written requirement about how or when the bailout beneficiaries must use the loot.  "There is no express statutory requirement that says you must make this amount of loans," said John C. Dugan, the comptroller of the currency (as quoted in the New York Time, 17 October 2008, p. B5).

Unless the issue of solvency, or lack thereof, is addressed and faith and trust in credit markets are restored, any amount of taxpayers' money bestowed upon the Wall Street gamblers would be tantamount to sending good money after bad money, as the beneficiaries would simply grab the loot and hoard it.

There is, however, an alternative that would not only help troubled homeowners to meet their mortgage obligations and stay in their homes, but also help create trust and liquidity in credit markets.  That alternative would focus on owner-occupied real assets, not phony or fictitious assets built on hot air--that is, on victims, not perpetrators.

The masterminds of the bailout scheme recklessly avoid addressing this core problem: inability of 5 to 8 million homeowners to pay their fraudulently inflated mortgage obligations.  Homeowners' inability to meet their mortgage payments, in turn, triggered a reverberation of insolvency throughout the vast bubble of mortgage-based claims and obligations that had been accumulated on a narrow base of real assets.

A logical and responsible solution would have started with homeowners, not predatory lenders and financial fraudsters.  This would have been much cheaper and more effective.  "Instead of trying to salvage a mountain of soured assets and prop up bankrupt institutions," as pointed out in my previous essay on this topic, "the government should allow for a market cleansing, or destruction, of such worthless assets by purchasing the threatened mortgages not at their inflated face value but at the current, depreciated, or market value."

There is, indeed, a successful precedence to this alternative: the FDR administration's response to the housing crisis of the Great Depression.  That administration created a credit agency for the financially distressed homeowners, Homeowners' Loan Corporation, which bought mortgages from private holders at prices that reflected realistic or going market values that eased their terms and allowed homeowners to meet their affordable obligations and stay in their homes.

Despite this relatively successful precedence (of course, in conjunction with the rest of the New Deal reform package), the current bailout scam follows the failed model of Herbert Hoover of the early 1930s.  In the face of the Great Depression, Hoover created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation that showered the bankers with public money in an effort to bail them out.  All it did, however, was to buy him a few months (perhaps that is also the goal of the current Bush administration, as it will soon be leaving the crime scene), but eventually led to the failure of almost all the banks within two years.

There is also the failed policy of Japan in trying to bail out its giant financial institutions during that country's housing crisis of the late 1990s.  In 1998, those financial institutions were facing huge losses following the bursting of the housing bubble in Japan.  Similar to Herbert Hoover's administration, the Japanese government has since poured enormous amounts of public funds into the coffers of those institutions in the hope of "creating liquidity" and "revitalizing credit markets."

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