bailout: erklärt

zum hintergrund:

"The main point of the original plan was for the federal government to buy distressed assets - like mortgages - from banks and other institutions. "Distressed" doesn't necessarily mean these are bad assets, or that the mortgages won't be paid back. It simply means these are debts that are selling way way below their longterm value. No one wants to pick up anyone's mortgages because housing prices are going down, foreclosures are going up, and shareholders of banks don't want them on the books.

So a package of mortgages that might be worth a million bucks in the long term if they're all paid back is only getting, say, $200,000 on the market. That's what's shrinking the credit markets. So the Federal government wanted to buy all this credit at a higher rate, bail out the creditors, and take on the mortgages. In the best of worlds, the Treasury would have made money off all this. They'd be using what government has over business (time) to purchase depressed investments and wait out the decades it takes for them to earn out."

der bail-out plan:
"First, they want to create the illusion that something is being done, so they talk about “superfunds” to bail out homeowners, [...], and other useless gestures. They do all this to appease angry consumers and consumer advocates [...]

Second, they want to make more money available to the creditors (banks), so they can keep lending money—because this is their business. So the Fed lowers interest rates again and again. Banks get more money, and guess what? We’re back where we started: with tons of money and nowhere to invest it! By lowering the “prime lending rate,” they simply add to the surplus cash that created the problem in the first place.

Of course, both measures serve to stave off panic selling, because it seems as though something real is being done. Homeowners may get a slight delay in the paralyzing rate increases on their mortgages, giving banks and creditors the chance to make a more orderly exit. They will bail from these mortgages while selling the artificially secured credit to the likes of you and me through money market accounts and other retail products. They just need time to make sure the real losses trickle down to someone else.

And remember: this whole mortgage fiasco is just a little preview of what happens next year when the credit card industry faces the very same self-imposed “crunch.”"

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