Quote from Landis82:
Then why is someone like fixed-income money manager Bill Gross very supportive of this plan? Why is it that price discovery of these assets is a bad thing? Why is it that doing a "reverse-auction" and getting private capital involved in purchasing these assets a bad thing?
You naively assume that this is "trash" paper. Yet, you obviously don't seem to have a COMMAND of the specifics regarding Paulson's proposal.
"Are you even aware of the FACT that of the $1 Trillion presumed whole, $800 billion involve subprime and Alt-A mortgage securities, which are of slightly higher quality than subprime? The remainder of losses is accounted for by under-water prime mortgage securities and unsecuritized loans.
Helping all this, is the fact that most of the troubled mortgage-backed securities lodged in financial institution balance sheets are senior slices of the securitizations that banks couldn't sell off because of their unexciting low-yields of 25-50 basis points over LIBOR. The good thing about these securitiies is that slices that are lower in the securitization structure have to absorb any losses on the underlying mortgages beofre the senior, triple-A tranches are touched. And most of the randier stuff was sold to hedge funds or shipped overseas to other speculative buyers.
Even though the RTC's liquidation process took more than 6 years and was criticized for favoring certain buyers, political cronyism,. etc. - - - it was still able to cut taxpayer losses on the S&L industry collapse from estimates as high as $350 BILLION to just $125 billion.
True, the RTC was simply involved in liquidation, rather than also buy assets since the govt. already owned the busted institutions. But in this case, the assets that the Treasury will wind-up with this time around will be much easier to manage than the "cats and dogs" that the RTC ended up with nearly 20 year ago."