Monday, December 22, 2008

Umm, What's The Next Bailout Plan?

Two months ago, when The Great Wall Street Bailout Plan I was being hashed out, a number of very able economists, including the fairly clairvoyant Nouriel Roubini, argued that that buying up all the banks' bad loans would cost the government a fortune without solving the credit problem. Agreeing that guaranteeing bad loans wasn't enough, Paulson & Co. reversed course and more or less adopted the alternate plan of pumping capital into the banks.

Now we've injected some $350 billion of new capital into the banking system, and it seems to have failed so far to reopen the credit markets and disappeared into a giant sinkhole. (And don't believe for a second that the government is going to earn some kind of great windfall on it preferred stock deal. As Zubin Jelveh at Portfolio.com has pointed out, other countries have been down this road before.) So, will $350 billion more do the trick? Or is there another idea?