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Why the Left Should Back Paulson….


The Paulson Plan is not well understood. It is not a bail-out of failing Wall Street companies. Those companies are being destroyed as we speak. Lehman, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch – all are gone now. The problem is that the housing debt they created lives on after them and hangs over the heads of ordinary Americans.

Without establishing a new market for those loans growing default rates could threaten, in fact have already threatened, the real economy. The Paulson Plan enables the federal government to step in and “make a market” for real estate where the broken private sector will not dare tread.

Very few Americans seem to understand what is at stake. If the market for mortgage and other asset backed securities is not stabilized by a very large financially sound player, the risk is that it will cause financial markets that ordinarily are very safe to totter. For example, a key market is the commercial paper market. This is a market for short term loans to very sound large businesses like GE, IBM and GM. They borrow billions through their finance arms to fund their working capital. They sell commercial paper to money market funds.

If those funds sell off their CP or refuse to buy newly issued CP then those large industrial companies lose their working capital. Last week, this was happening to a small group of money market funds. As a result, in one example, IBM’s cost of borrowing tripled in a matter of days. To make this even more clear, one of the large players in commercial paper markets are power plants that use CP to finance their purchases of fuel for power plants.

It is conceivable if the CP market fails that power plants could run out of fuel and the lights would start going out.

Fortunately, we have solved this kind of problem before – in the New Deal that rescued the country from the Great Depression. A key institution was the Reconstruction Finance Corporation that pumped money into a moribund mortgage market to lead the way for private capital, in pension funds and elsewhere, to step back in. By renegotiating mortgage payments, by being willing to stand behind the ability of ordinary Americans to pay their mortgages countless homes and businesses were saved by public intervention where the free market had failed the country.

What Paulson and Bernanke propose is very similar to the efforts of the New Dealers.

Here is a description of how that effort worked from someone who was there, Jesse H. Jones:

Lessons from the New Deal

Reviving the Real Estate Mortgage Market

From Fifty Billion Dollars – My Thirteen Years with the RFC by Jesse H. Jones

What is the largest single type of investment in which the American people put their money? It isn’t the railroads or highways or insurance policies or savings accounts or corporate stocks and bonds. It is the mortgage on real estate. From the ten-acre farm to the tallest skyscraper, almost every piece of property in the country has carried a mortgage at one time or another. Mortgages have financed the construction of nearly every home, factory, store, or office building in this country

During the depression the almost measureless market for mortgages went into total eclipse. The RFC [Reconstruction Finance Corporation] helped to bring it back into the light of day – and also into the light of reason.

That accomplishment required a good many years of hard work. Even after the banking structure had been made sound and agriculture was again moderately prospering, and most of the water had been wrung out of railroad finances, the real estate mortgage market remained immobile, congealed with fear. The part taken by the RFC in its recuperation was accomplished without cost to the taxpayer, although we used millions to put life into it. We got the money back and made a small profit for the government. Better still, we helped restore faith and confidence in the orderly financing of real estate.

When the RFC went directly into the mortgage business in 1934 countless mortgage loans were in default throughout the country. Thousands of costly, useful buildings, such as apartment houses, hotels, offices, stores, warehouses, and factories put up by corporations and covered by mortgage bonds, had gone into receivership. At that time real estate mortgages on urban loans alone – all farm and rural properties being out of consideration – aggregated more than thirty five billion dollars.

Of that sum about nine billion dollars in mortgages was held by commercial banks and trust companies and mutual savings banks, seven billions by building and loan associations, and six billions by life insurance companies. Five more billion dollars was in real estate mortgage bonds held by the public. The remainder was held by trustees, educational and charitable institutions, fire and casualty companies, and individuals.

Many of the properties then in default could have been safely reorganized both in the interest of the bondholders and equity owners and without loss to the new money. But there was no new money available in the real estate field – none for retirement of maturing mortgages, none for new construction except, in spots, from one of the more prosperous life insurance companies….

In the booming 1920’s many of our larger cities had been overbuilt or at least expanded in advance of requirements by optimistic promoters.

The mortgage bond houses which financed these promotions not only charged excessive interest rates but, to make matters worse, required amortization payments much beyond the earning power of the properties even in prosperous times.

But this was not a valid reason for forever condemning real estate or real estate securities….the whole real estate market couldn’t remain in collapse….Having convinced ourselves that there was no mortgage money available to save the situation, we asked Congress in 1934 for authority to buy preferred stocks in mortgage companies, much as we had been doing in banks…But we were never able to get anyone to start a mortgage company. Times were so pessimistic that no one would put up money for common stock in such an enterprise….

So, in the spring of 1935, we started the RFC Mortgage Company with a capital of $10,000,000 which later was raised to $25,000,000. The company did a lot of good, and it made some money for the government.

We bought and sold…mortgages to make a market and encourage financial institutions to buy them. We wanted to prove that the mortgages were good and then withdraw from the field….

We immediately offered to buy…mortgage[s]…at 99 per cent of the face value of the mortgage and to sell it at par. We soon had insurance companies and other big investors interested. Then we raised our price, paying par for the mortgages and selling them at a slight premium. They finally became a popular investment with fiduciaries and trust companies.

[Over time this effort resulted in] profitable enterprises for the government as well as a great help to the public….

Ground Control to Major Tom: New York to Regulate Some Credit Default Swaps

The massive struggle to bring the value of derivatives down to earth is underway. The latest move is by the state of New York, a leading center of regulation of the insurance industry.  The yelps heard from derivatives industry representatives is a sign of the emerging political fault lines.
They are, finally, re-classifying credit default swaps where the protected bond is actually held by the buyer of protection as “insurance” (duh) and thus subject to the requirements that the seller hold sufficient regulatory capital to back up the insurance protection offered.
A brief summary of how CDS’s work: 
  • An investor like a pension fund may buy a bond (C: “Credit” – the reference ) issued by GM that is worth $10 million.  
  • If the pension fund is worried (about GM, no, come on, really?) that the issuer of the bond will default (D: “Default”), they can sell (S: “Swap”) the risk to a counter-party, a seller of a CDS, for a fee (typically, 2% of the value of the bond, so, in this case, $200,000) payable each year during the life of the bond.  
  • If the issuer, GM, defaults, the seller of the CDS will have to pay the pension fund the outstanding value of the bond.  AIG is a giant issuer of CDS’s like this.
This may strike most followers of this issue as a bit like closing the barn door after the horse has fled the barn.  There is something like 60 trillion dollars of notional value of CDS’s out there and only a fraction are written to protect someone who actually holds the underlying.  
A much larger market is made by selling CDS’s that reference a bond issued by a third party like GM but where the purchaser of the protection has not actually bought the bond.  They simply want to bet on the possibility of a default – in this case they would get up to $10 million without ever having actually had to purchase the bond.
Nonetheless, this is the kind of move that is likely to change the dynamics of this asset class in important ways – namely, to slow it down and possibly alter its shape and impact for many years to come.

naked capitalism: New York to Regulate Some Credit Default Swaps

UPDATED: The GM/UAW VEBA: 80 years or 80 days?

UPDATE: GM CEO AND CFO SUGGEST VEBA MAY BE KILLED OFF.

GM and the UAW secured a controversial contract victory earlier this yearb based in large part on a promise to rank and file auto workers and retirees that their health care benefits would be secure for 80 years under a new entity called a Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association, or a VEBA.
In a VEBA the employer agrees to put in sufficient assets, in cash and securities, to finance health care benefits for retirees. The liabilities associated with health care obligations are no longer on the books of the employer but stand in a separate trust managed by independent trustees who owe retirees a fiduciary duty. In the case of the GM/UAW VEBA, the trust is to be established by the UAW itself which will appoint its board of trustees.
But GM’s financial woes, including the announcement recently of a loss of more than $15 billion in the second quarter, will no doubt cause many UAW members and retirees to wonder if the VEBA will last 80 days much less 80 years.
Now Bloomberg is reporting that both the GM CFO and CEO have told Wall Street that the financial condition of GM is so dire that the VEBA itself may have to be reconsidered. So much for the assurances of the UAW leadership during the recent contract talks.
Technically the VEBA comes into existence after a federal court certifies that the new entity is in the interests of retired UAW members who are not able to influence or vote on actual contract terms as are working UAW members.  That court process is in its final stages. The court process has in and of itself been controversial because it is believed by many that the retiree plaintiffs are hand picked by the UAW itself and thus may not argue for retiree rights aggressively.
The GM and the UAW agreed that the company could stage its payments owed to the VEBA over several years. And now to bolster GM’s financial picture, the UAW agreed to a delay in the payment of $1.7 billion owed the VEBA, in essence loaning that amount back to GM. The UAW will, in theory, accrue interest payments on that loan.
But GM owes another $4.0 billion payment in 2010 and a third payment of $4.4 billion in 2012. No assurance has been given that those payments will in fact be made on time or at all. No doubt, the thousands of GM workers who were lured into early retirement after hearing the 80 year promise by UAW President Gettelfinger will be nervous that Gettelfinger was singing them a song.

GM Swings to $15.5 Billion Loss Amid Write-Downs, Sales Slump – WSJ.com

UPDATED – China Fakes Ethnic Children! China’s abuse of Olympics Rules shows true colors

See link below to update on fake ethnic children.


While most of the abuse and manipulation of children in China occurs in the sweatshops that some in the west celebrate for their impact on poverty reduction, the Chinese communist regime’s abuse of Chinese gymnasts is shining an important light on the lack of respect for basic international rules by the Chinese government.

It turns out that China’s own press had reported that one of the gold medal winning gymnasts was under age. But the website has now been changed to eliminate any trace of that reporting. It is, of course, worth noting that this report comes to us via Yahoo! which itself has been complicit in providing confidential information about dissidents to the Chinese regime.

Put that together with the growing list of other abuses by the regime and a true picture of the ghastly disrespect of this state for the rule of law becomes clear: manhandling of a British television journalist covering a Students for Free Tibet protest, the suppression of several such pro-Tibetan autonomy protests, the use of a lip synching replacement for the singer of the key song at the opening ceremonies, fake ethnic children (!), the digital manipulation of fireworks at the opening ceremonies, the refusal to allow ordinary Chinese workers to attend the games for free when thousands of seats at many events remain empty…the list goes on and on.

No wonder some are calling these the Olympic Shame Games.

State-media story fuels questions on gymnast’s age – Olympics – Yahoo! Sports

Nobel Voice of the Gulag Solzhenitsyn dies aged 89

Certainly one of the most moving portraits of the plight of workers in the former Soviet Union is found in Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.  
I do not think it miminizes that work to suggest that one reason it is so moving is that it has its echoes in the plight of millions of workers in today’s labor camps and sweatshops around the world, whether in the Los Angeles garment industry or the textile mills of China. 
As in once-stalinist Russia, these workers toil without enforceable legal rights or trade unions to protect them. The world economy benefits from the cheap labor, but at what cost?

Nobel prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn dies aged 89|
guardian.co.uk