COMMENT According to reports in Washington, the Obama administration may be close to devoting as much as $100bn of the second tranche of the troubled asset relief programme funds to creating an “aggregator bank” that would remove toxic securities from the balance sheets of banks. The plan would be to leverage this amount up 10-fold, using the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet, so that the banking system could be relieved of up to $1,000bn (€770bn, £726bn) worth of bad assets.
Although the details have not yet been decided, this approach harks back to the approach originally taken – but eventually abandoned – by Hank Paulson, the former US Treasury secretary. The proposal suffers from the same shortcomings: the toxic securities are, by definition, hard to value. The introduction of a significant buyer will result, not in price discovery, but in price distortion.
