Obama - Medidas aplicadas e a aplicar segundo a Reuters

A GUIDING principle of any financial bail-out is that it should be "comprehensive", said Timothy Geithner, America’s treasury secretary, as he unveiled America’s latest effort to stabilise its banks and unfreeze credit markets on Tuesday February 10th. "There is more risk and greater cost in gradualism than in concerted action," he added. He was at pains to distance himself from the "tentative" steps taken under his predecessor, Henry Paulson—conveniently ignoring the fact that these were often taken in close collaboration with Mr Geithner himself.
Bold action was needed to fix a banking system that was now standing in the way of economic recovery rather than catalysing it, he asserted. For all the tough talk, however, the new plan, which will deploy the second half of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Programme (TARP), was frustratingly light on detail.


Medidas a Tomar

The new framework has four main planks.

(1) Banks will have to undergo a "stress test" to ascertain whether they have enough capital to absorb future losses in the event of a severe economic decline. Those that do not will have access to "contingent equity", in the form of preferred shares convertible into the common sort. This will ensure they are strong enough to "preserve or increase lending".

(2) Second, after much debate the Obama administration has settled on a public-private approach to tackling the troubled mortgages and other assets clogging up balance-sheets. The idea is to tempt up to $1 trillion of private capital off the sidelines to buy this debt, by offering some form of government co-financing. With private firms determining the price, there should in theory be less risk of misvaluing securities. But the concept remains vague, and the devil will be in the details.

(3) The third component may be the most promising. Using more seed money from the Treasury, the Federal Reserve will quintuple the size of its $200 billion programme to finance purchases of securities backed by car, credit-card and student loans. It will also expand beyond consumer credit to bonds linked to commercial mortgages. This marks a big step in the government’s efforts to plug the gap left by the collapse of non-bank funding, particularly securitisation. Hedge funds are said to be keen to buy such paper with Fed help.

(4) A smaller amount will be set aside to deal with the problem at the heart of the crisis: housing. Some $50 billion will be channeled into preventing "avoidable" foreclosures, though it is not clear if this will include write-downs of principal, which many economists say are needed to stop the rot as more homeowners slip into negative equity. Banks that receive public money will be required to set up loan-modification schemes that are consistent with guidance from the Treasury. More details of the housing plan are expected over the next week.

(5) Mr Geithner’s plan places a number of other constraints on banks that receive support: they will not be able to take over healthy rivals for cash until they have repaid taxpayers, for instance. And they will have to disclose a lot more about their dodgy assets and loan volumes. But they will no doubt feel that things could have been worse. Banks will not, as some feared, be subject to lending quotas, at least officially. And their managers will keep their jobs.

Medidas não tomadas

Bad Bank

Overall, this is a big package. But it will strike some as timid as well as vague. The idea of a government-owned "bad bank", which would take banks’ worst assets off their hands, had become increasingly popular in recent weeks as it seemed to offer a clean break. Mr Geithner looked at it closely. Why he rejected it is unclear, but he may have deemed the up-front cost prohibitive, and he is clearly taken with the idea of a big role for private buyers. Markets are no clearer now about how toxic debt will be valued and isolated than they were before.
That explains the sharp falls in stockmarkets, particularly in the shares of big banks such as Bank of America and Citigroup, after Mr Geithner’s speech. Having allowed expectations of a bold and detailed plan to build, he served up a disappointment—not the wisest of moves in the midst of a severe crisis of confidence. Worse, this invites uncomfortable parallels with some of Mr Paulson’s failed initiatives. He announced the original version of the TARP, and before that a rescue for structured investment vehicles, amid much fanfare, only to stumble when he later tried to flesh out details.

Nacionalização

Moreover, Mr Geithner’s plan treads gingerly around a problem that many economists would rather see tackled head-on: some of America’s largest banks could already be insolvent. For these, nationalisation may be the best option. That is hard to swallow in the land of laissez-faire capitalism, even today. On Tuesday Mr Geithner reiterated his determination to keep banks private where possible, saying: "Governments are not good at running banks." But taxpayers are in no mood to prop up basket-cases. All eyes will be on those stress tests in the coming weeks.