Thursday, April 2, 2009

Toxic Asset Plan: "Loopholes Big Enough For An Investment Banker to Drive His Ferrari Through"

The story and pullquote are from BusinessWeek via Phil Izzo at DealJournal who gets the Hat Tip.
From BW:

Here are five ways hedge funds and investment banks may exploit Treasury's toxic-assets plan

It has been a little less than two weeks since Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner unveiled the details of his project to restore banks to financial health. But analysts say hedge funds and investment banks are already looking for ways to exploit the complex web of auctions, public-private partnerships, and government guarantees proposed by Treasury to cleanse banks' books of toxic assets. "It's a highly gameable system," says H. Peyton Young, an Oxford University economist and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "It's very difficult to write rules that are going to prevent self-dealing behavior." >>>MORE