[Rhodes22-list] Bailouts - looking for facts (not exactly Political, but not sailing either)

[jbconnolly at comcast.net]

I would like to find some actual data, but I lack the time and expertise to find it.

The proposed $700B bailout was compared in the mediat to the S&L bailout of the 1980's.

A guy I used to know worked in the early 1990s for the Resolution Trust Corporation.  He "cleaned up" and re-sold properties aquired from failed S&Ls.  Not sure where he is at now, since he and his associates did themselves out of a job many years ago.   I would ask him whether there was ever a final accounting of what the S&L bailout cost after the real assets were sold?  It may still have cost U.S. billions.  It might possibly have broken even, given real estate appreciation, and the time it took to dispose of all the assets.  It would be good to know.

Similarly, I heard on the radio the other day that the proposed bailout would acquire the currently valueless mortgage-backed securities from institutions at cents on the dollar.  Exactly how many cents on the dollar ($0.10, $0.90?) remains to be seen.

It seems to me that if you paid, say $0.50 on the dollar, and only 10% of the mortgages in a security were bad, once you had either (a) removed and foreclosed on the bad loans and sold the assets, or (b) renegotiated them so that some poor schmucks could have one final chance to keep their houses, and sold off the "cleaned up" securities, even the government could at least break even in the end.

Jim Connolly
s/v Inisheer
'85 recycled '03