the return of the toxic assets

Not a bad movie, but probably a whole lot worse...

The trailer's primary line? "They never went away; they're lurking, under the surface, ready to emerge again!"

From Andy Kessler in the WSJ...

We should have eaten those toxic assets instead of sweeping them under the carpet.

The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) was a foolish bait and switch. To prevent the 2008 financial crisis from worsening, TARP was originally designed to buy toxic mortgage derivatives weighing down banks and Wall Street, but no one could decide what price to pay for them. Too high and TARP would look like a government handout. But if the Treasury paid what they were worth, which was not much, financial firms would have to take huge write-offs, forcing many of them into insolvency and even nationalization.

So Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson switched plans, investing TARP funds directly into banks for a piece of equity. The idea was that banks would "earn out" their toxic portfolio—i.e., slowly write them off against the profits gained by the Federal Reserve's zero interest rate policy. It was a bold bet that the Treasury and Fed could engineer an economic recovery without allowing the bottoming action of a sharp but swift repricing of the U.S. housing stock. It turns out they only bought time, not a recovery, and now we are paying for that mistake.

Despite all efforts, the deleveraging continues. The $862 billion Congressional stimulus didn't stimulate the economy because it went into unproductive projects. The Fed's $1.4 trillion quantitative easing/dollar printing sent 30-year mortgage rates to record lows, but not enough people are buying homes because home prices haven't fallen enough to clear the inventory. And with 9.5% unemployment and 18.4% underemployed, there are more sellers than buyers....

And those toxic mortgage assets? As far as I can tell, most are still there, valued at "mark to wish" since the Financial Accounting Standards Board's relaxation of "mark to market" accounting rules. Who knows what they're really worth? The stock market is guessing not much, sending finance stocks like Bank of America, Wells Fargo and even J.P. Morgan down close to 52-week lows....

There are three fixes:

• QE toxic. The Fed's quantitative easing has been focused on buying Treasurys as well as packages of high-quality mortgage assets. It's time to go back to the original TARP and start buying toxic assets directly from banks, no matter the price....Clean those balance sheets up for good...

• Import buyers. Someone has to step up and buy those 1.5 million extra homes in inventory....create a million visas for qualified immigrants, say, those with a masters or Ph.D., and watch home prices start to rise.

• Wait. Business deleveraging is an overhang for the economy, but it's really the consumer that is overdrawn....Bad policy (tax increases and regulatory burdens) will only extend it. You can't hurry up this deleveraging....There are so many price distortions that markets, let alone business leaders, are confused as to what is real. So they sit on their hands. The only way out is to let prices go to where they need to go to clear the overhang....