Excerpts:
The toxic loans portion of Tim Geithner's Public Private Investment Program looks to be officially dead.
There are two ways of understanding what happened here. The first is that banks couldn't sell their assets at current prices because doing so would have rendered them effectively insolvent. In this scenario, PPIP fails to fulfill its intended function: Saving the banks. The toxic assets survive and the banking system remains hollow and unhealthy.
The second is that banks no longer need to rush their troubled assets off their books because they're increasingly able to raise private capital, operate in a restored financial market, and wait out the last vestiges of the storm. They can, in this world, let the value of the assets rise naturally, and sell them off later. In this scenario, PPIP is no longer necessary.
In other words, this is either a sign that all is right with the world or all is much worse than Geithner thought. How's that for a definitive analysis?
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/06/geithners_plan_is_dead.html
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