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Published on Tuesday, March 24, 2009 by Project Syndicate

Fiscal Plan Fails both Markets and Taxpayers

by Joseph Stiglitz

Let's be clear: President Barack Obama inherited an economy in freefall and could not possibly have turned things around in the short time since his election. Unfortunately, what he is doing is not enough.

The real failings in the Obama recovery program lie not in the stimulus package -- though it is too heavily weighted toward tax cuts, and much of it merely offsets cutbacks by states -- but in its efforts to revive financial markets. America's failures provide important lessons to countries around the world that are or will be facing increasing problems with their banks:

  • Delaying bank restructuring is costly, in terms of both the eventual bailout costs and the damage to the overall economy in the interim.
  • Governments do not like to admit the full costs of the problem, so they give the banking system just enough to survive, but not enough to return it to health.
  • Confidence is important, but it must rest on sound fundamentals. Policies must not be based on the fiction that good loans were made, and that the business acumen of financial-market leaders and regulators will be validated once confidence is restored.
  • Bankers can be expected to act in their self-interest on the basis of incentives. Perverse incentives fueled excessive risk-taking, and banks that are near collapse but are too big to fail will engage in even more of it. Knowing that the government will pick up the pieces if necessary, they will postpone resolving mortgages and pay out billions in bonuses and dividends.
  • Socializing losses while privatizing gains is more worrisome than the consequences of nationalizing banks. American taxpayers are getting an increasingly bad deal. In the first round of cash infusions, they got about 67 cents in assets for every dollar they gave (though the assets were almost surely overvalued, and quickly fell in value). But in the recent cash infusions, it is estimated that Americans are getting 25 cents, or less, for every dollar. Bad terms mean a large national debt in the future.
  • Don't confuse saving bankers and shareholders with saving banks. America could have saved its banks, but let the shareholders go, for far less than it has spent.
  • Trickle-down economics almost never works. Throwing money at the banks hasn't helped homeowners: foreclosures continue to increase. Letting AIG fail might have hurt some systemically important institutions, but dealing with that would have been better than to gamble upwards of $150 billion and hope that some of it might stick where it is important. One of the reasons we may be getting bad terms is that if we got fair value for our money, we would by now be the dominant shareholder in at least one of the major banks.
  • Lack of transparency got America's financial system into this trouble. Lack of transparency will not get it out. The Obama administration is promising to pick up losses to persuade hedge funds and other private investors to buy out banks' bad assets. But this will not establish ''market prices,'' as the administration claims. Banks' losses have already occurred, and their gains must now come at taxpayers' expense. Bringing in hedge funds as third parties will simply increase the cost.
  • Better to be forward looking than backward looking, focusing on reducing the risk of new loans and ensuring that funds create new lending capacity.

There is no ''mystique'' in finance: The era of believing that something can be created out of nothing should be over. Short-sighted responses by politicians -- who hope to get by with a deal that is small enough to please taxpayers and large enough to please the banks -- will merely prolong the problem.

An impasse is looming. More money will be needed, but Americans are in no mood to provide it -- certainly not on the terms that we have seen The well of money may be running dry, and so, too, may be America's legendary optimism and hope.

© 2009 Project Syndicate
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