FDIC to Guarantee Treasury PPIP Loans

From the NYT:

In the fine print of Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner’s plan to lend as much as $1 trillion to private investors to help them buy toxic assets from our nation’s banks, you’ll find some details of how the F.D.I.C is trying to stabilize the system by adding more risk, not less, to the system.

It’s going to be insuring 85 percent of the debt, provided by the Treasury, that private investors will use to subsidize their acquisitions of toxic assets.

The terms are hard to beat. They are, for example, “nonrecourse,” which means that if an investor loses money, he owes taxpayers

So where did the risk go this time?

To the F.D.I.C., and ultimately, to us taxpayers. A close reading of the F.D.I.C.’s statute suggests the agency is using a unique — some might call it plain wrong — reading of its own rule book to accomplish this high-wire act.

Somehow, in the name of solving the financial crisis, the F.D.I.C. has seemingly been given a blank check, with virtually no oversight by

The F.D.I.C. is insuring the program, called the Public-Private Investment Program, by using a special provision in its charter that allows it to take extraordinary steps when an “emergency determination by secretary of the Treasury” is made to mitigate “systemic risk.”

Simple enough, but that language seems to bump up against another, perhaps more important provision. That provision clearly limits its ability to borrow, guarantee or take on obligations of more than $30

So how is the F.D.I.C. planning to insure more than $1 trillion in new obligations? This is where things get complicated and questions are being raised.

The plan hinges on the unique, and somewhat perverse, way the F.D.I.C. values the loans. It considers their value not as the total obligation, but as “contingent liabilities” — meaning what it expects it could possibly lose. As the F.D.I.C’s charter dictates: “The corporation shall value any contingent liability at its expected cost to the corporation.

Try a variation of that argument on your FDIC examination team........

So how much does the F.D.I.C. think it might lose?

“We project no losses,” Sheila Bair, the chairwoman, told me in an interview. Zero? Really? “Our accountants have signed off on no net losses,” she said.

By this logic, though, the F.D.I.C. appears to have determined it can lend an unlimited amount of money to anyone so long as it believes, at least at the moment, that it won’t lose any money.

Right..........

Here’s the F.D.I.C.’s explanation: It says it plans to carefully vet every loan that gets made and it will receive fees and collateral in exchange. And then there’s the safety net: If it loses money from insuring those investments, it will assess the financial industry a fee to pay the agency back.

Ms. Bair said that she can not imagine the F.D.I.C. losing money on the scale I suggested in my doomsday scenario. She said that before announcing the program, the F.D.I.C.’s lawyers determined that the statute allowed it to guarantee loans by valuing them as contigent liabilities. “That’s how we’ve interpreted it,” she said, adding that the determination was made back in October when the F.D.I.C. first introduced the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program, which is also backed by the F.D.I.C.