Public Ownership — But No Public Control

CorpWatch : Public Ownership — But No Public Control

Posted by Rob Weissman on October 21st, 2008

Originally posted Tuesday, October 14. 2008 — It is an extraordinary time. On Friday, the Washington Post ran a front-page story titled, “The End of American Capitalism?” Today, the banner headline is, “U.S. Forces Nine Major Banks to Accept Partial Nationalization.”
There’s no question that this morning’s announcement from the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) is remarkable.

It was also necessary.

Over the next several months, we’re going to see a lot more moves like this. Government interventions in the economy that seemed unfathomable a few months ago are going to become the norm, as it quickly becomes apparent that, as Margaret Thatcher once said in a very different context, there is no alternative.

That’s because the U.S. and global economic problems are deep and pervasive. The American worker may be strong, as John McCain would have it, but the “fundamentals” of the U.S. and world economy are not. The underlying problem is a deflating U.S. housing market that still has much more to go. And underlying that problem are the intertwined problems of U.S. consumer over-reliance on debt, national and global wealth inequality of historic proportions, and massive global trade imbalances.

Although it was enabled by deregulation, the financial meltdown merely reflects these more profound underlying problems. It is, one might say, “derivative.”

Nonetheless, the financial crisis was — and conceivably still might be — by itself enough to crash the global economy.

Today, following the lead of the Great Britain, the United States has announced what has emerged as the consensus favored financial proposal among economists of diverse political ideologies. The United States will buy $250 billion in new shares in banks (the so-called “equity injection”). This is aimed at boosting confidence in the banks, and giving them new capital to loan. The new equity will enable them to loan roughly 10 times more than would the Treasury’s earlier (and still developing) plan to buy up troubled assets. The FDIC will offer new insurance programs for bank small business and other bank deposits, to stem bank runs. The FDIC will provide new, temporary insurance for interbank loans, intended to overcome the crisis of confidence between banks. And, the Federal Reserve will if necessary purchase commercial paper from business — the 3-month loans they use to finance day-to-day operations. This move is intended to overcome the unwillingness of money market funds and others to extend credit.

But while aggressive by the standards of two months ago, the most high-profile of these moves — government acquisition of shares in the private banking system — is a strange kind of “partial nationalization,” if it should be called that at all.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson effectively compelled the leading U.S. banks to accept participation in the program. And, at first blush, he may have done an OK job of protecting taxpayer monetary interests. The U.S. government will buy preferred shares in the banks, paying