Krugman Says Bailout In Evitable, We Need to Go Swedish

I think that it is likely that a taxpayer funded bailout would be the only viable option, as Paul Krugman says in his NY Times OP/ED. He also notes that while the whether to bail out is settled, the how is not:

The U.S. savings and loan crisis of the 1980s ended up costing taxpayers 3.2 percent of G.D.P., the equivalent of $450 billion today. Some estimates put the fiscal cost of Japan’s post-bubble cleanup at more than 20 percent of G.D.P. — the equivalent of $3 trillion for the United States.

If these numbers shock you, they should. But the big bailout is coming. The only question is how well it will be managed.

As I said, the important thing is to bail out the system, not the people who got us into this mess. That means cleaning out the shareholders in failed institutions, making bondholders take a haircut, and canceling the stock options of executives who got rich playing heads I win, tails you lose.

In his NYT blog, he also notes that when one looks at financial meltdowns, the Swedes handled it best, with the handling of their financial problems in the early 1990s".

He points us to Justin Fox of Time, who in turn quotes Merrill Lynch Economist David Rosenberg from his "morning call notes" (sorry, can't find a link, any hints?):

The Japanese credit crisis is usually cited as the benchmark for what not to do. But few cite Sweden's crisis as a template on what might actually work. ... the Swedish authorities realized early on that a banking crisis cannot be resolved until the problem is properly defined. That means assessing who the "bad" and "good" houses of issues are and be willing to allow the "bad houses" to fail (as an aside, "good houses” do not necessarily imply "big" houses).

... Sweden established a Bank Support Authority to undertake "reality testing" on the loan books of Sweden's largest banks and had a "board of valuation” experts go in and value the assets on the books of all the lenders. Call it invasive if you will, but then again, the government was doing the work that market players could not or would not do – value the collateral and do it quickly. This is similar to what Barney Frank is proposing in the US mortgage sector today. ...

It should also be noted that it was Sweden's equivalent of the US Treasury, and not the central bank, that played the primary role in this crisis management stage (though the Riksbank maintained an accommodative monetary stance and lowered interest rates right through to December 1993, more than a year after the markets had bottomed). And, it obviously required the heavy hand of government intervention; there are solid grounds for this when there is market failure in the private sector, in this case, insufficient information regarding the quality of financial sector balance sheets. ...

I would add that my post on Dean Baker's proposal of a stock transaction tax, along with my suggestion that it more generally cover financial instruments (here) is both a good way to cover the budget hit and a good way to discourage excessive arbitrage.