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Bloomberg – The Obama administration will announce details of a plan today to expand the $700 billion rescue of the financial system that will rely on enticing private investors to buy the troubled assets clogging banks’ balance sheets.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who will unveil the Public Private Investment Program today, has crafted an approach using up to $100 billion of bailout money to spur investment funds to purchase — and banks to unload — the illiquid securities and loans that have caused credit to dry up. The Treasury, Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. will all play a role alongside private investors in aiming to buy between $500 billion and $1 trillion of troubled assets.
“By providing a market for these assets that does not now exist, this program will help improve asset values, increase lending capacity by banks, and reduce uncertainty about the scale of losses on bank balance sheets,” Geithner said in an op-ed piece published in today’s Wall Street Journal. “The ability to sell assets to this fund will make it easier for banks to raise private capital.”
10 News – Investors will be listening closely to details of the $1 trillion toxic asset-purchase program to be announced Monday as the Obama administration seeks to provide enough information to satisfy markets and avoid the kind of stock meltdown seen last month.
Then, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner disappointed by giving only broad outlines of the government’s approach to kick-start lending and the overall economy. With the sharp market plunge that followed Geithner’s speech on Feb. 10 still a fresh memory, administration officials Sunday sought to temper expectations for Monday’s announcement. "Ridding bank balance sheets of problem assets is the next step in that process of fixing the financial system, but it alone won’t solve the credit problem," Treasury Department spokesman Andrew Williams says.
Bloomberg – Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s financial-rescue plan may be doomed if he doesn’t offer low-cost loans to hedge funds and other investors to help them buy toxic assets weighing down bank balance sheets.
Creating a “bad bank” or “aggregator bank” that would use federal funds to acquire and warehouse the assets, as some have proposed, would be costly for taxpayers and require too much government interference, say two experts on distressed securities who have pitched an alternative plan to officials.
John Ryding, chief economist at RDQ Economics LLC in New York, and Matt Chasin, chief operating officer of Sorin Capital Management LLC, a Stamford, Connecticut-based hedge fund that manages about $1 billion, say the Treasury Department should provide loans at commercial rates to investors for up to 50 percent of the purchase price of securities. The financing would be for as long as the maturities of the assets being acquired.
