The US government will announce as soon as Monday a long-awaited plan to try to get bad assets off the books of banks, a cornerstone of its efforts to tackle the credit crisis, The Wall Street Journal reported. The Obama administration, battling a deepening recession, is set to adopt a three-pronged approach to ridding the financial system of so-called toxic assets, the newspaper and the New York Times said on their websites on Friday.
The plan would create an entity, backed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, a US banking regulator, to buy and hold loans, the reports said. It would expand a newly launched Federal Reserve facility - that lends money to investors to buy securities backed by consumer loans - to include toxic assets. And it would create new public and privately financed funds to buy such securities under the management of private investment experts. The Obama administration plans to contribute between $75 billion and $100 billion in new capital to the effort although that amount could be expanded, the Wall Street Journal said.
The Treasury Department and Federal Reserve declined to comment. Sources familiar with the governments thinking have told Reuters details of a plan could be announced next week. The Bush administration tried without success late last year to set up a mechanism to get bad assets off the balance sheets of commercial banks.
The banks have been hammered by losses incurred by mortgage-related debt that has turned sour amid a fall in house prices and a pickup in defaults, sparking a credit crisis that has strangled the US and global economies. Obamas Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, has outlined a new proposal to soak up as much as $1 trillion in assets through a public-private program.
But investors have grown increasingly concerned that his efforts are running into problems more than a month after he outlined the plan. The slow start of the new Federal Reserve consumer lending program this week has been seen as a sign that private capital may shun the toxic-asset plan because of public outrage over large executive bonuses.
Many big private investors are worried they could face tough new rules in US financial rescue programs after Congress pressed ahead with efforts to claw back bonuses paid to executives at failed insurer American International Group. The Wall Street Journal said the Treasury would match private sector finance for the public-private toxic asset funds on a one-for-one basis in most cases.