:: Friday, March 19, 2010

Home » Blogs » Government Takeover of AIG Fails to Calm Market

I confess I wasn’t happy to wake up Wednesday morning and find out that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson had decided to put taxpayers on the hook for up to $85 billion in loans to AIG, the world’s largest insurer of mortgage-backed securities.

I was even more dismayed at the news that the Treasury wasn’t just loaning money to AIG (money it doesn’t really have), it had actually seized AIG, relieved its managers of their duties, and had taken over, at least for the short term. So now, the U.S. owns and runs AIG. Wow.

Was that really necessary?

Early on, the talking points Wednesday were familiar ones: lots of “too big to fail” sorts of statements, along with frequent reassurances by government officials and financial pundits that the worst that could come of the AIG bailout would be an orderly dissolution that would not roil markets as traumatically as a sudden bankruptcy would. In a better case scenario, they assured that there was even a chance that the government could actually make some money selling off parts of AIG, since only the divisions that insure structured investment vehicles and bad mortgage debt are unprofitable.

The reassurances fell mostly on deaf ears.

The Dow dropped 200 points right after the opening bell, swung wildly all day but mostly down, and ended the day down almost 450 points. Down 500 on Monday, 450 on Wednesday, what next? Press Secretary Dana Perino was out in front of cameras expressing confidence in the economy’s ability to withstand these shocks, and John McCain was out in front of cameras trying hard not to repeat the phrase, “Our economy is fundamentally sound,” without, at the same time, inducing further panic.

Carly Fiorina, former (deposed, as in “fired”) CEO of Hewlett-Packard was, I think, hiding in a closet somewhere after telling the press on Tuesday that McCain, Palin, Obama, and Biden were all unqualified to run a major corporation. (Many pundits gleefully pounced on the fact that, apparently, so was Fiorina.)

Fiorina is a McCain adviser. But maybe not for long.

Weirdly, the cable news channels seemed much more interested in who was getting the most political traction out of the queasy atmosphere on Wall Street: the McCain campaign or the Obama campaign. Real, thorough analysis of the day’s financial events was not easy to find. At one point, I did catch a brief televised interview with a member of the Reagan administration who expressed the (rather off the wall) opinion that what was most needed to calm this crisis was immediate corporate tax cuts, and lots of them.

That would have been funny if he didn’t mean it, and the markets weren’t really tanking.

While it may seem trite, the problem, as I see it, is that markets don’t like uncertainty, and right now, no one knows how deep these problems go and how many more financial institutions might fail. The government takeover of AIG sent a message that the situation is now dire, so dire that a bridge loan wasn’t enough; nothing less than a complete government takeover would do. Even though the intent was to stabilize markets by slowing down the collapse of AIG, markets were not calmed by the realization that AIG was collapsing, and that it would have collapsed over the course of a single day without government intervention.

It’s hard right now to take in the magnitude of what is happening, but if we all keep in mind how long this bubble has been building, how disguised all this bad debt is, and how enmeshed it still is in the worldwide financial system, it shouldn’t be a surprise. By most accounts, Washington Mutual may well be next, and after that, it’s hard to take an educated guess who else will fall.

Things could go on like this for another week, another month, another year. No one knows.

All of which spells a rough ride for financial markets for the foreseeable future. I don’t think there is anything that will soothe these troubled waters anytime soon. But I’m pretty certain of one thing: these bailouts will not play well on Main Street. People were already upset over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Now we’re taking on AIG, the auto industry has its hand out for $50 billion, no one knows how many banks will fail after that, and ordinary people are getting really fed up.

Wall Street may be in shock. Main Street saw this coming a mile off.

Related posts:

  1. The Market Demand for Government Investment
  2. Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac: When Will the Government Learn?
  3. Calm in the Face of Fiscal Insanity
  4. AIG, Wall Street Bailouts: Is the Federal Reserve’s Independence at Risk?
  5. Effects of the Recession and Stock market decline on Millionaires

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