If No Foreign Investors Would Touch AIG, WaMu or Merrill Lynch, Can Taxpayers Expect a 'Return' from Bailout?

As Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf noted on Wednesday, Sept. 24, the problem is that the face value of mortgage loans and a raft of other bad loans far exceeds current market prices or prices that are likely to be realized this year, next year or the year after that. They are packaged into what the financial press rightly calls “toxic.” The bailout is not efficient, he writes, “because it can only deal with insolvency by buying bad ets at far above their true value, thereby guaranteeing big losses for taxpayers and providing an open-ended bail-out to the most irresponsible investors.” “The simplest way to recapitalize institutions,” He concludes, is “by forcing them to raise equity and halt dividends. If that did not work, there could be forced conversions of debt into equity. The attraction of debt-equity swaps is that they would create losses for creditors, which are essential for the long-run health of any financial system.” This is the key: if debts cannot be paid, then creditors must take losses.