ANYTHING YOU CAN DO WE CAN DO WORSE:

Economists not keen on GOP bailout (VICTORIA MCGRANE, 9/26/08, Politico)

The plan centers on insuring mortgage-backed assets at prices and premiums set by the government, creating a virtual backstop for the debt. This would not require an initial outlay of taxpayers’ funds in the neighborhood of Paulson's $700 billion. Democratic leaders say Paulson doesn’t believe a mortgage insurance proposal will work, though he hasn’t said so publicly.

“I frankly don’t understand how this is supposed to work,” said Douglas Elmendorf, an economist at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution and an outspoken critic of the Paulson rescue plan.

People generally buy insurance for events that are unlikely to happen; a homeowner pays out a couple hundred dollars for fire insurance, and if their house burns down they get hundreds of thousands of dollars from their insurance company, provided by premiums collected from other policyholders, he explained.

“But with mortgage-backed securities, the bad thing has already happened,” Elmendorf said. “They’ve lost their value.”

The emerging GOP alternative does not resolve the problem of how the government prices the toxic assets at the heart of the crisis, experts said. In the Paulson plan, the government has to figure out how much to pay for the assets. But in the GOP alternative, the government would have to determine the premium prices to insure against the risk that the mortgages behind the assets don’t get paid off.

Many observers were buoyed by the modifications unveiled Thursday by Democrats and Senate Republicans that would allow the federal government to take out warrants — the option to buy shares — on some of the companies’ participating in the rescue. That way, if Treasury paid way too much for a firm’s assets, taxpayers would share in the windfall to the company.