Obama: Is Bank Nationalization Off the Table?

Bond market guru David Goldman of the marvelous Inner Workings blog thinks so:

What convinced the Obama administration not to play Dr. Frankenstein with the banking system? The collapse of the British pound and the soaring cost of insuring against a British default must have gotten someone’s attention. The sharp backup in US Treasury term yields despite an equally sharp fall in US equity market, moreover, must have alerted some in Washington that the credit of the US Treasury was not impregnable. The worst thing about bank nationalization is NOT that the government will do a bad job of banking. Everyone does a bad job at banking. The worst thing is that it places untold trillions of dollars of new liabilities on the shoulders of a federal government that already is borrowing well over $1 trillion a year.

Me: You can also toss the rising cost of sovereign debt insurance into the mix as well.  But I am not sure that the First Bad Bank of the United States option is any better.

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