Brad DeLong on Obama's plan, Krugman on DeLong

[ProSense]

The Other View

By Josh Marshall

I wanted to flag for everyone that Brad DeLong is not nearly so down on the new Geithner plan as some others are.

March 22, 2009

Brad DeLong’s defense of Geithner

Brad gives it the old college try. But he shies away, I think, from the central issue: the non-recourse loans financing 85 percent of the purchases.

Brad treats the prospect that assets purchased by public-private partnership will fall enough in value to wipe out the equity as unlikely. But it isn’t: the whole point about toxic waste is that nobody knows what it’s worth, so it’s highly likely that it will turn out to be worth 15 percent less than the purchase price. You might say that we know that the stuff is undervalued; actually, I don’t think we know that. And anyway, the whole point of the program is to push prices up to the point where we don’t know that it’s undervalued.

So default on those non-recourse loans is a substantial possibility, which means that there is a large implicit subsidy involved. That’s why Christie Romer’s claim that we’re relying on the “expertise of the market” rings so hollow: we’re giving investors a big subsidy, so this has nothing to do with letting markets work.

And a final point: I’m with Atrios here. If getting the prices of toxic assets “right” isn’t enough to rescue the banks, that doesn’t mean that we’re doomed; it means that we actually have to, you know, rescue the banks, Swedish style, rather than rely on fancy financial engineering to make the problem go away.