Bad Banks

I am intrigued by the notion of a “bad bank”. As far as I can understand it (even thinking the word “economics” causes me to descend into a stupor), a “bad banks” is a place to put “bad or toxic assets”. The World Street Journal says: “A good bad bank forces banks to write down their bad assets and cleanse their balance sheets with those made insolvent being recapitalized, nationalized or liquidated by the state.” To begin, this concept provides us with two new wonderful oxymorons to ponder: “Bad asset” and “toxic asset.” I’m not the linguist here, but it occurs to me that if something is bad or toxic it is not an asset. In a disturbing side note, I can’t seem to shake the image of Tim Geithner with a tiara and a wand querying: “Are you a good asset or a bad asset?”

The notion of a “bad bank”, a place to isolate or sequester something to prevent it from doing further damage to the society, is not a new concept. When we have people who are “bad assets”, we send them to prison. When people are toxic, we lock them in isolation wards.

• A quick glance at the Department of Justice website reveals that as of December 31, 2007:
• 2,293,157 prisoners were held in federal or state prisons or in local jails – an increase of 1.5% from year-end 2006, less than the average annual growth of 2.6% from 2000-2006.
• 1,532,817 sentenced prisoners were under state or federal jurisdiction.
• There were an estimated 506 sentenced prisoners per 100,000 U.S. residents – up from 501 year-end 2006.

Clearly, the notion of creating human bad banks for our human bad assets has been less than fully successful and thus I ponder the wisdom of creating a parallel bad universe for our economy. As a reminder, we remain one of the few nations in the civilized world where when people who are really bad assets can, to use the WSJ's language, be “liquidated by the state”.

Like the millions of people held in our prison systems, there is the hope, that these “bad or toxic” assets will ultimately be rehabilitated. American taxpayers will acquire bad assets and we hope that ultimately they will provide some value. In the interim, can we make some value of these bad assets? For instance, can we use bad assets to invest in license plate manufacturing? This, it seems to me, may be an approach to bringing together a new bad and a venerable bad American institution. Can we have the growing hoards of imprisoned white collar criminals, who have used their financial acumen to bilk honest citizens out of billions of dollars, use these toxic funds to invest in developing nations such as Iran and North Korea? Can we use these bad assets to pay a portion of Alex Rodriguez’s $28 million salary? Certainly, he has earned it.

Once Bernard Madoff is in jail, give him these toxic assets. If he can turn them around, and through his perverse wizardry make them into “good assets” he can use the proceeds to pay back the countless non-profit organizations and trusting individuals who he swindled for billions of dollars. Perhaps then, he can repay society a bit and, in exchange, spend slightly less time in eternal hell – which, by the way, is God’s approach to bad assets.

© David Raphael, 2009