Elizabeth Warren - Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program - told the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs today:
In April, the Panel looked back on the first six months of Treasury’s TARP efforts and offered a comparative analysis of previous efforts to combat banking crises in the past. We found that the successful resolution of past financial crises involved four critical elements: transparency of bank accounting, particularly with respect to the value of bank assets; assertiveness, including taking early aggressive action to improve salvageable banks and shut down insolvent institutions; accountability, including willingness to replace failed management; and clarity in the government response. Without those elements, a financial crisis is likely to create long-term economic problems.
The government, of course, hasn't implemented any of these recommendations.
Warren told the panel:
The toxic assets remain on the books of the banks, The commercial real estate mortgages are a coming crisis. Small banks are continuing to fail. We were talking a year ago about too big to fail. We are now facing an industry that's more concentrated than it was a year ago and too big to fail is up on us now in a much larger sense.Until we get down to dirt, to something that's solid, that we can put our feet on, our financial institutions are standing in a secure place, we can't rebuild and know that we are safely past this crisis.
The question about how we're going to get these toxic assets out of here at a time when the real estate mortgage market is still in trouble and the commercial real estate mortgage market may be getting into more and more trouble – I'm not hearing the plan.
Harvard Law Professor -Elizabeth Warren's naïveté -is thunder-struck astounding.
ReplyDeleteNever, Elizabeth Warren, -NEVER! in the history of the planet has any government ever had a solution for anything. You might send a note to your enfeebled intellectual alma mater to let them know that irrefutable fact.
The only thing government has ever been able to do with something approaching efficacy, -is to get out of the way and stay out of the way, -in order to allow others to cut away the undergrowth and carve a path through the jungle-
-the sooner, the better too.
Right now great swarms of ne'er-d-wells are professing prophetic knowledge and an ill-informed humanitarian preeminence that can only further exacerbate the incompetence of the ongoing societal destruction.
It is not a time for more government. It is a time for less government, and now -more than ever before.
The lives of billions depend upon it.
How can SRS be crapping so badly when commercial real estate sucks?
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