Anna Schwartz, 92, die große alte Dame der Wirtschaftsgeschichtsschreibung, mit Milton Friedman Co-Authorin von "A Monetary History of the United States", nennt die Fehler bei der Bekämpfung der derzeitigen Krise beim Namen...


Kurz gefasst: Die Interbanken-Kreditverweigerung am Markt entsteht dadurch, daß die Banken giftige Derivate in den Büchern haben, die niemand mehr kaufen will. Würden diese Papiere zu Marktpreisen verkauft wären etliche Banken bankrott. Dadurch weden ihre Bilanzen unglaubwürdig und sie erhalten keine Kredite mehr.

Die einzige Lösung besteht nach Anna Schwatz darin die Banken bankrott gehen zu lassen, die sich verspekuliert haben, statt ein System als ganzes retten zu wollen aus Furcht vor einem Dominoeffekt.


"The basic problem for the markets is that [uncertainty] that the balance sheets of financial firms are credible."

So even though the Fed has flooded the credit markets with cash, spreads haven't budged because banks don't know who is still solvent and who is not. This uncertainty, says Ms. Schwartz, is "the basic problem in the credit market. Lending freezes up when lenders are uncertain that would-be borrowers have the resources to repay them. So to assume that the whole problem is inadequate liquidity bypasses the real issue." [...]

But "that's not what's going on in the market now," Ms. Schwartz says. Today, the banks have a problem on the asset side of their ledgers -- "all these exotic securities that the market does not know how to value."

"Why are they 'toxic'?" Ms. Schwartz asks. "They're toxic because you cannot sell them, you don't know what they're worth, your balance sheet is not credible and the whole market freezes up. We don't know whom to lend to because we don't know who is sound. So if you could get rid of them, that would be an improvement." The only way to "get rid of them" is to sell them, which is why Ms. Schwartz thought that Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's original proposal to buy these assets from the banks was "a step in the right direction."

The problem with that idea was, and is, how to price "toxic" assets that nobody wants. And lurking beneath that problem is another, stickier problem: If they are priced at current market levels, selling them would be a recipe for instant insolvency at many institutions. The fears that are locking up the credit markets would be realized, and a number of banks would probably fail.

Ms. Schwartz won't say so, but this is the dirty little secret that led Secretary Paulson to shift from buying bank assets to recapitalizing them directly, as the Treasury did this week. But in doing so, he's shifted from trying to save the banking system to trying to save banks. These are not, Ms. Schwartz argues, the same thing. In fact, by keeping otherwise insolvent banks afloat, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury have actually prolonged the crisis. "They should not be recapitalizing firms that should be shut down.""

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