Robert Murphy sobre las consecuencias contra-producentes del bailout... antes de que se aprobara:
[A]t first glance, it seems odd that the location of these risky mortgage-backed securities remains so mysterious. After all, if a firm realizes that it made some horrendous decisions and now must announce losses, why not just get it over with and move on? Even if such an announcement would spell instant insolvency, it is not obvious how the shareholders gain by postponing the inevitable and allowing the company to fritter away more wealth by sputtering along.
However, this dynamic completely changes if there is a chance that the federal government will swoop in and buy up the bad assets well above the (current) market price. Investors are complaining about the lack of transparency regarding institutions' exposure to mortgage-backed securities, but this opaqueness of their balance sheets is itself exacerbated by the ever more generous assistance provided by the Fed and Treasury since the troubles began in August 2007. Rather than 'fessing up and taking their lumps, the most troubled firms decided to wait it out. And those firms that managed to hold on have just been rewarded with their cut of a $700 billion pot.
