you have got to be shitting me

[Eric P]

This boggles the mind. One prominent investor yesterday said he wouldn't purchase toxic assets from banks under Tim Geithner's public-private investment partnership (the cheerily named PPIP) plan because, among other reasons, it cheats the taxpayers in an obvious and uncomfortable way by making them pay the difference between the high price the banks sell the assets for and the low price investors pay for them. But you know who's okay with that? Banks who took TARP money!

Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan, the Financial Times is reporting, have all become interested in using the PPIP, the terms of which will allow them to buy and sell toxic assets to each other — assets which, of course, they are now allowed to value at a price beyond what they're worth. Representative Spencer Bachus had an appropriate response to this plan, we think, calling it "a new level of absurdity" and vowing to draft legislation against it. Allowing financial institutions to begin "colluding to swap assets at inflated prices using taxpayers’ dollars," he told the paper, is simply "gaming the system to reap taxpayer-subsidised windfalls." Or, as Clusterstock put it, it's money laundering. But oddly, the government seems totally onboard with it. "It is between a bank and their supervisor whether they are healthy enough to acquire assets," one unnamed Treasury official told the paper. We find ourselves actually hoping that whoever said that was high on meth. Because otherwise, what we're hearing is that the Treasury thinks that the only way to fix the economy is by letting the banks go back to engaging in the same shady behavior that got us into this. That doesn't quite sit right.

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2009/04/tarp-taking_banks_plan_to_game.html

[Eel O'Brian]

i just want to know when can we start firing bankers headfirst out of cannons into brick walls

[Eric P]

i'm slowly joining the triumph party

[TEEEPO]

 

[Howard Alan Treesong]

Yeah, I've been reading that one of the major problems with these plans is that they assume this is a slump and that the assets will eventually regain their original value

as opposed to, you know, a recalibration wiping out billions of dollars of imaginary wealth that was never there to begin with

if people aren't willing to admit it was all smoke and mirrors to begin with then we're just going to replace it with fog and glass

[Great Rumbler]

the terms of which will allow them to buy and sell toxic assets to each other

Nuke Wall Street.

[Human Snorenado]

i'm slowly joining the triumph party

We have decoder rings and use the metric system!  Come join us!  Guillotine Tuesdays are 1/2 price drinks!

[Flannel Boy]

i'm slowly joining the triumph party

We have decoder rings and use the metric system!  Come join us!  Guillotine Tuesdays are 1/2 price drinks!

Guillotines? Metric system? Half-price drinks?

Count me in! Let the heads roll and the drinks flow--250 mL at a time!

[The Fake Shemp]

When Dad gets back from Europe, he better take this kids behind the shed.

[Joe Molotov]

[gibletsngravy]

fucking Obama 

[Eric P]

(Image removed from quote.)

bandwidth exceeded