Late in December, when inspiration for new articles runs dry, we journalists love getting boozed on “SOMETHING of the Year” spirits. So here’s an aperitif to cap off 2009. What was Obama’s most important economic decision of the year? Noam Scheiber has an answer. Passing the $787 billion stimulus package? No. Picking Tim Geithner? No. Taking over General Motors? Heavens, no.
It was … the stress tests?
Here’s Noam.
Per usual, this is clear-headed, straightforward thinking and you
should read the whole article. For my two cents, Dan and I have said
for a while that one of the most important things the government did
early when the recession was still mostly a financial crisis was we
stood behind the banks and essentially said: Armageddon will not
happen, and we have the trillions to back that promise up. The Federal
Reserve opened wide its balance sheet to buy bad assets. The Treasury
swung open its doors with hundreds of billions of dollars of TARP to
throw at struggling banks. We put AIG and Citi on government crutches.
We arranged a semi-forced marriage between Merrill Lynch and Bank of
America. These steps told investors that the United States was not in
the business of managing large-scale nationalization or allowing
large-scale bank failure. We were in the firefighting business.
The stress tests, whether they were honest or not, were the damage
report. They told investors that the house that was once on fire was
going to stand. When history judges this year, it will probably
characterize the bailouts as a double-edged sword. On the one had, the
government’s implicit guarantee to save Wall Street probably averted a
depression. On the other hand, by setting a floor on bank losses we
deepened our troubling tradition of moral hazard, which encourages top
tier bank institutions to bet big, knowing the government will have to
bail them out if they lose. But those implications are next year’s debate. This year, I agree with the Noam that the stress tests are something to be thankful for.
