Geithner Details Plan for Bad Bank

In an op-ed article in the Wall Street Journal on March 23 , and in a release on the morning of the 23d , Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner provided details on the Government’s plan to set up a new bank that will buy the toxic loans that “currently burden the financial system.” Called the Public-Private Investment Program, the new bank will use from $500 billion to $1 trillion in financing, which Geithner said in his op-ed would account for a “substantial share of real-estate related assets originated before the recession that are now clogging our financial system.”

The new bank will use government funds from Treasury, the Fed, and the FDIC, Geithner wrote, to entice private investors such as pension funds to purchase loans from banks and “securities from the broader markets.” The risk of the new bank will thus be borne by the government and private investors, and those private-sector investors will set the price for those loans and other “legacy assets” that commercial banks will want to sell to get them off their balance sheets.