Delayed response by Paulson led to virus spreading all over the system
One of US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's biggest mistakes has been his delay in tackling the US financial crisis before it spread throughout the financial system. Like cancer, one has to treat it before it spreads to other parts of the body, otherwise it will be too late.
Several critics, including George Soros, the hedge-fund financier, have argued if Paulson had taken on the US financial system earlier this year after the Bear Stearns collapse, he could have saved Lehman Brothers and prevented its bankruptcy. The collapse of Lehman has spread the financial virus throughout the US and global financial markets.
One US research house has put the US debt-related losses at about US$2.7 trillion (Bt91.92 trillion), with the mark-to-market ones totalling $575 billion.
"These aren't precise numbers, but they are broadly indicative. The main thing to take away from them is that they are huge and that they are much larger than they were when we first started to do our estimates. And the reason that they are larger is that the problems were not contained," said the research house.
Then there are the estimated declines in equity. Because of declines in real estate and equities, another $12 trillion is lost.
"With these losses, Americans' net worth is reduced and prospective incomes are reduced, so their creditworthiness is reduced," the research house said.
European and UK leaders have rushed to push out emergency measures to shore up liquidity. At a summit in Paris, the European leaders announced a rescue plan that is modelled after the UK plan. The European plan will also offer five-year government guarantees for new bank debt.
This follows the UK Treasury's action last week to bail out the big banks. Under the plan, the government will inject ฃ37 billion (Bt2.21 trillion) in preference shares into the Royal Bank of Scotland ( RBS), Lloyds TSB and HBOS, which will likely give it a controlling stake in RBS and a significant stake in the combined Lloyds/HBOS.
Moreover, the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England and the Swiss National Bank have announced that they will offer unlimited collateralised dollar liquidity to unfreeze the money markets.
Paulson has adjusted the $700-billion rescue package to shore up the US banks' capital instead of buying out the bad debts from them alone. The idea is to help the banks maintain their capital-adequacy ratio standard.
Initially, he wanted to buy out just the bad debts, but the financial markets went on a selling spree because they did not believe this was the right cure.
Now, $125 billion of the $700-billion package will be used to inject capital into nine US commercial banks. This will strengthen their balance sheets and help them to weather the financial storm.
Hopefully, they will be in a stronger position to snap up the weaker financial institutions.
Another $125 billion will be spent on increasing the capital of other financial institutions, while the rest will go to buying out the bad assets of the financial institutions in order to relieve the burden from their books.
Paulson has insisted that once the bail-out plan is up and running, the banks will become healthier and can resume lending to their customers.
But the problem is that the banks might have to think twice before lending to corporate or individual customers, most of whom are over-leveraged.
The banks will either have to give customers more cash to refinance their debt or they will need to write down the debts, a process that would be painful.
In the Thai experience following the 1997 financial crisis, the banks only hoarded the cash and bought government securities instead of taking a risk of lending the money to their customers, who might become non-performing loans again. It was not until after five years that the banks started to shift gear to lend their money again.
**An analysis by By Thanong Khanthong,The Nation, Published on October 15, 2008**
