bobbyw24
03-11-2010, 10:42 AM
America has experienced a classic economic boom and bust, which I first chronicled in the November 2007 Freeman.
Ill-conceived policies to encourage homeownership channeled cheap credit into housing markets. Land-use and zoning policies restricted the supply of housing in key desirable markets. In The Housing Boom and Bust, Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution has shown how these policies brought about a crisis in housing and finance.
Others have told the story from a number of perspectives and with varying emphasis on different factors. My purpose here is to focus on the policy responses to the crisis and ask whether they have been helpful or harmful.
TARP
On October 3, 2008, Congress enacted the law creating TARP (the Troubled Asset Relief Program), which was authorized to spend up to $700 billion to purchase troubled assets from financial institutions. A little more than a month later, then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson announced that rather than buying troubled assets, the Treasury would use the money for capital injections into banks in return for preferred shares.
Regardless of one’s attitude toward bailouts generally, Paulson’s original plan was a recipe for disaster. To help the banks he would have needed to overpay for the assets to the detriment of the taxpayers. If he had paid then-current prices, accounting rules would have forced all firms holding such assets to write them down (not just those selling the assets). Financial institutions holding dubious mortgage-backed assets were desperately trying not to write them down because that might have threatened their depleted capital base. It is fair to say that Paulson failed to grasp the underlying problems at these institutions when he first proposed the program.
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/boom-and-bust-crisis-and-response-3/
Ill-conceived policies to encourage homeownership channeled cheap credit into housing markets. Land-use and zoning policies restricted the supply of housing in key desirable markets. In The Housing Boom and Bust, Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution has shown how these policies brought about a crisis in housing and finance.
Others have told the story from a number of perspectives and with varying emphasis on different factors. My purpose here is to focus on the policy responses to the crisis and ask whether they have been helpful or harmful.
TARP
On October 3, 2008, Congress enacted the law creating TARP (the Troubled Asset Relief Program), which was authorized to spend up to $700 billion to purchase troubled assets from financial institutions. A little more than a month later, then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson announced that rather than buying troubled assets, the Treasury would use the money for capital injections into banks in return for preferred shares.
Regardless of one’s attitude toward bailouts generally, Paulson’s original plan was a recipe for disaster. To help the banks he would have needed to overpay for the assets to the detriment of the taxpayers. If he had paid then-current prices, accounting rules would have forced all firms holding such assets to write them down (not just those selling the assets). Financial institutions holding dubious mortgage-backed assets were desperately trying not to write them down because that might have threatened their depleted capital base. It is fair to say that Paulson failed to grasp the underlying problems at these institutions when he first proposed the program.
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/boom-and-bust-crisis-and-response-3/