Word: bailouts
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What Americans are fast learning is what the market pros knew all along - the bailout bill may turn out to be a pill that dulls the pain, only to leave deeper global economic wounds festering. "We're in the midst of a panic," says James Angel, professor of finance at Georgetown's McDonough School of Business. Angel, who teaches a course on financial crisis, says that even the injection of federal dollars may not convince banks to shed their fears. "If banks go from being too reckless to being too conservative, there may be general starvation for the economy...
...there's no certainty it will adequately ease the flow of lending in a market permeated by fear of further failures. In fact, the Federal Reserve's move Tuesday to take an active role in the commercial paper market for short-term loans was a tacit acknowledgement that the bailout bill will not on its own stem the bleeding...
...cost of insurance against a Morgan Stanley credit default recently exceeded an unheard of 1000 basis points, even after the bailout bill was signed into law. That means the market price for insurance against a $10 million Morgan Stanley default hit $1 million per year, more than 10 times the typical ceiling cost for such insurance in a normally functioning bank sector. "The bailout is a step forward, but it's not at all clear that it's going to work," says Darrell Duffie, professor of finance at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business...
None of that is to say that the bailout bill won't help at all. Paulson and Co. have a lot of flexibility under the legislation, and could ultimately act as a kind of sovereign wealth fund, injecting cash for equity, as famed investor Warren Buffett recently did with Goldman Sachs. Or the Feds could avoid carrying equity by lending money to financial institutions willing to buy up questionable bank assets at discounted rates. But first the Treasury seems ready to dip into its $700 billion to establish a reverse auction set-up to ensure that the government doesn...
...market. Chris Low, chief economist of FTN Financial, said buying commercial paper was a "very good move," but explained that "investors almost have to see things work now before they'll believe them." In particular, Low pointed out, investors may want to be sure that this year's bailout shows results - unlike last year's Master Liquidity Enhancement Conduit, which was an attempt to solve the subprime crisis by three private banks (Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America) using private money - essentially what Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson hopes to do now with public funds. Within months, however...