A Very Enjoyable Layover
by tdaxp ~ July 11th, 2009
We scheduled our return to have a seven-hour layover in San Francisco.
Very enjoyable.
tdaxp, Ph.D.
High-minded, fanatically malthusian perspectives
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July 11th, 2009 at 7:31 am
i’m surprised you’re not all over the CIT story. Treasury is allowing them to fail, because Treasury believes their competitors can pick up the business they leave behind without too much difficulty. competitors are basically GE cap.
now you don’t have to be a conspiracy minded american to see how GE cap and Goldman are related. helping GE cap is a subsidy to Goldman if there ever was one.
but more importantly, it seems that the way Treasury has decided to deal with systemic risk is by making some existing finanical insitutions even bigger than they were when they were too big to fail.
i have to say, i’m getting a little annoyed by this. i actually think CIT is being punished by their refusal to participate in the GM DIP financing consortium that treasury was originally proposing. you scratch our back, we’ll scratch yours.
July 11th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Fed X,
Thanks for noting this!
More on the possible bankruptcy of CIT is available from Calculated Risk [1,2].
On its own, of course, this would signal the Treasury’s return to market economics. However, I doubt we will see a simultaneous statement that the Treasury could imagine a collapse of Citi, Bank of America, or even that it hopes to be repaid for the grants it gave Goldman Sachs.
Therefore, Treasury’s support of market economics in this case is like Deng Xiaopeng’s support for liberalism during the “Democracy Wall” movement: if it actually exists, it is just a tool for the Oligarchs to remove an unhelpful collaborator.
[1] http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/07/cit-hires-bankruptcy-adviser.html
[2] http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/07/report-fdic-unwilling-to-back-cit-debt.html
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Wall