So I watched the auto companies’ CEOs ask Congress for money. In fact, I watched almost all four hours of Tuesday’s beg-a-thon before the Senate Banking Committee. I didn’t blog about it because I was frantically struggling to tease a magazine column out of it. Now that’s done, and I want to share one thing I learned: The car CEOs and …
Wall Street & Markets
From TARP to BARF
I had CSPAN on so I wouldn’t miss the exciting beginning of the Senate Banking Committee’s hearing on the auto industry (because automakers are the new banks), and I caught the end of a White House presser. Some reporter was asking Dana Perino if maybe she should stop calling the bank bailout the TARP since it no longer was in fact a …
Maybe Hank Paulson should give silence a try
Judy Biggert, a Republican from Illinois, had a question for Hank Paulson at today’s House Financial Services Committee hearing: What ever happened to that plan to insure troubled mortgages assets that we included in the bailout bill?
This insurance plan was a bad idea, seemingly ginned up on the fly by Eric Cantor so it would at least …
The bankruptcy-by-some-other-name solution at GM
Last week, after considering GM’s arguments for why it can’t go into Chapter 11, I wrote:
GM is headed for bankruptcy without government intervention. So any government intervention ought to be structured like a bankruptcy: Current shareholders wiped out (they’re almost there already), debt converted to equity, top management out. We
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Larry Fink gave a speech and I was there
Larry Fink, the BlackRock CEO who has found himself playing a central role in our recent financial tumult time and again, gave a speech today at a conference put on by NYU’s Schack Institute of Real Estate. It was a pretty good speech, so even though I’m getting around to it late in the day, I thought I’d put up a greatest hits version …
Congress ♥ hedge funds
The signature moment of today’s long House committee hearing on hedge funds came deep in the Q&A. Massachusetts Democrat John Tierney looked at hedge fund manager John Paulson, who earlier had offered some pointed suggestions on how Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson ought to be using the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, and …
The other Paulson’s defense: We’re a job-creating exporter
Yesterday was Hank Paulson Day. Today it’s John Paulson’s turn. The hedge fund manager, who took home a $3.7 billion paycheck last year by betting on the mortgage bust, is one of several hedgie bigwigs testifying before Henry Waxman’s Committee and Oversight and Government Reform. They’re only just getting to the Q&A, but I loved this …
Paulson’s big defense: I’m just like John Maynard Keynes
I wrote a piece for Time.com about Hank Paulson’s chat with the world this morning. It begins:
It was his first formal public defense and explanation of his actions since the dust settled from the financial panic of late September and early October, and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson had clearly been thinking about it for a while.
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Will the GE Capital bailout make a GM bankruptcy easier?
GE has just announced (pdf) that GE Capital has been approved to participate in the FDIC’s Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program. The FDIC will now guarantee all GE Capital debt (subject to some limits) issued between this Friday and June 30, 2009. Banks already have this deal. Now GE Capital does too.
As an interesting side-note, GE …
An unintended consequence of the TARP-and-switch
While Justin has had his eye on Hank Paulson, I’ve been listening to the House hearing on how well investors, servicers and lenders are going along with mortgage modifications.
Barney Frank had nice things to say about the efforts of Frannie, JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America (never mind that B of A got sued into changing the terms of …
Hank Paulson says he saved us from a broad systemic event
Here’s what the Treasury Secretary has to say for himself this morning:
The actions taken by Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the FDIC in October have clearly helped stabilize our financial system. Before we acted, we were at a tipping point. Credit markets were largely frozen, denying financial institutions, businesses and consumers
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Surprise! Warren Buffett negotiated a better deal with Goldman Sachs than the Treasury Department did
It’s already been noted that Warren Buffett seemed to get a much better deal on his Goldman Sachs capital injection than the Treasury Department did. It turns out the United Steelworkers union has been kind enough to actually run the numbers on the two deals, using the Black-Scholes option pricing model to value them (steel workers are …