Trickle Down Or Trickle Up?

The world’s financial system is as weak now as it has been in many decades. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke has a huge problem on his hands: a very wide-ranging credit freeze up surrounding financial institutions. This is a problem that mere cuts in interest rates cannot cure. The extremely low interest rates we experienced in the early to mid 2000’s as well as the tendency to throw caution to the wind has left the financial world at jeopardy. This care free attitude was started by Alan Greenspan; a major Wall Street player who was bailed out of trouble with borrowed funds and now has led us down a perilous path. Now there’s a problem. Those speculative derivatives do not have the value that the Wall Street salesmen claimed they had. There’s a desperate race to de-leverage at almost any price. Of course, buyers have grown scarce. No institutional investor wants to add more highly overvalued speculative package to his portfolio now that the true value of these packages is exposed in the light of day. We are in a liquidity crisis the magnitude of which we haven’t seen since before World War II. Commercial and investment banks sitting on overvalued and illiquid assets such as mortgages and private equity loans can’t sell them because they are packaged with derivatives of highly questionable value (a polite way of saying that Wall Street lied about their true value and overpriced them by billions and billions of dollars). The net result is that they don’t have the cash with which to make new loans. This lack of liquidity is killing our credit based economy. Moreover, for banks and brokers to strengthen their balance sheets by de-leveraging, it would require banks to reduce the number of loans on their books. This would devastate the economy and make what might be only a bad recession into one far, far worse and longer-lasting. This is the reason for the bailout by the Federal Reserves by means of long term financing at discount prices. What other choice do they have? They can let the entire financial infrastructure of the world freeze up or lend cash to financial institutions and take the subprime mortgages and related securities of questionable value as collateral. In this way the Federal Reserve has become the buyer of last resort which is very inflationary. These financial middlemen are intended to take the cash borrowed from the Federal Reserve and lend it out again to higher quality borrowers; unfortunately this is not happening. Theoretically, this would work out as a trickle-down effect. So why don’t we give a trickle-up effect a try? The purposed bailout will cost at least $1,000,000,000,000. That is one trillion dollars for those having trouble! Instead of giving one trillion dollars of newly created money to the Wall Street players who are largely a part of our current problems, why not give that money to the people of America? This way it can then trickle-up to the Wall Street players by stimulating the economy. By giving about $3,200 to each person in America we may be able to get the cash flow back in the right track. This means a family of five would get $16,000 in cash to spend how they choose. Commercial as well as investment banks are stuck with puffed up assets such as mortgages and private equity loans they cannot sell because they are packaged with derivatives of exceptionally questionable value. This is a kind way of saying that Wall Street fat cats lied about the value and has overpriced them by billions of dollars putting
J Stromsteen is an expert in field of finance. Besides her website, Cheap Auto Insurance, she contributes to Bush’s Depression as well as first time home buyer to provide up to date information on the mortgage crisis.
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