Financial, Real Estate, Stock Markets Trends and Current Affairs

It will be a very unwise thing to overpay for bad banks assets in a political climate such as this.

President Obama is not an unwise man.

The insolvent bank shareholders are @#$@%. (Reggie Middleton Syllogisms coming to a theater near you!)

TARP Shortchanged Taxpayers by $78 Billion, Congress Oversight Panel Says

U.S. taxpayers are being shortchanged by about $78 billion through the Treasury Department’s bank bailout, the panel overseeing the program said.

The Treasury, when it was headed by Secretary Henry Paulson, received bank assets worth about $176 billion in exchange for capital purchases of $254 billion under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the Congressional Oversight Panel said in a report today.

“The loss estimate is conservative,” said Representative Alan Grayson, a Florida Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee. “It could turn out that those assets in the end are worthless. These are massive handouts to favored institutions to try to make up with taxpayer money the mistakes they made with investor money.”

The public’s stake in the nation’s banking system continues to grow as first the Bush administration and now President Barack Obama’s team work to pull the U.S. out of the deepest recession in at least two generations. TARP, which is part of the more than $9 trillion the government has pledged to rescue the financial system, has guaranteed $350 billion to banks so far, with another $350 billion set for use in coming months.

Geithner's Financial-Rescue Plan May Emphasize Guarantees Over `Bad Bank'

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s strategy to aid the nation’s banks will likely emphasize guarantees of toxic assets over proposals to create a so-called aggregator bank that would remove them from balance sheets, according to people familiar with the plan.

The government guarantees, which might be modeled on those already given to Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp., may be coupled with the purchase of preferred shares in the banks that would be later convertible into common stock, some of the people said. The aggregator bank or ‘bad bank,’ has lost favor, in part because the potential costs involved, they added.

“Our agenda is to begin to shape the architecture of a financial recovery plan that’ll help get credit flowing again,” Geithner said before a meeting yesterday with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and other members of the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets. Geithner will announce the plan on Feb. 9.

The Obama administration has its work cut out for it. U.S. banks have already racked up $745 billion in credit losses and have warned of more to come. Shares of Bank of America, the country’s largest bank, touched a 24-year low yesterday amid concern it would be taken over by the government. The stock recovered to end the day 3 percent higher at $4.84.

The risk is that the administration’s measures will fall short of what some experts say is required to restore confidence in the financial system and get credit flowing again. Nouriel Roubini, a professor at New York University, has predicted that U.S. losses may ultimately reach $3.6 trillion.