"If you would like an empirical law of government behavior, it is that in a panic or threatened financial collapse, governments intervene -- every government, every party, every country, every time." (A.J. Pollock)
Mungkin ada gunanya belajar dari masa lalu, seperti yg tertulis di WSJ http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB122186662036058787-lMyQjAxMDI4MjIxMDgyNjA2Wj.html Salam, ENda ---------------------- Government Bailouts: A U.S. Tradition Dating to Hamilton Michael M. Phillips The bubble pops. Lenders freeze. Depositors lose faith. Panic spreads. And the government steps in because nobody else will. Today it is Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke putting together the rescue package for a financial system rocked by falling home prices and a wave of defaults on subprime mortgages. But a short walk through U.S. history demonstrates the point made by Alex J. Pollock of the American Enterprise Institute: "If you would like an empirical law of government behavior, it is that in a panic or threatened financial collapse, governments intervene -- every government, every party, every country, every time." The Panic of 1792 The nation's first president was in his first term when the U.S. ran into its first financial panic. In 1791, the federal government assumed obligations that such states as Massachusetts and South Carolina owed from the Revolutionary War, part of a larger deal that included moving the national capital from New York to Philadelphia to Washington. Taking on the states' obligations added about $18 million to a total U.S. domestic debt of $65 million -- debt securities that proved attractive to financial speculators. Savings and Loan Crisis It used to be that savings-and-loan associations were staid institutions that stuck to home loans and lured savings-account depositors with blankets and toasters. But during the 1980s, the industry expanded wildly into commercial real-estate lending, spurred by deregulation and poor regulation, according to Mr. Blinder. The business model worked as long as the S&Ls made more money on their loans than they had to pay for deposits. But the model broke down when interest rates rose, and the institutions found themselves paying more for deposits than they earned from fixed-rate loans in their portfolios. "In addition," said Mr. Blinder, "they went into a lot of what could only be called stupid real-estate investments." >From 1986 through 1995, about half of the 3,234 S&Ls in the U.S. closed, leaving federal insurers stuck with tens of billions of dollars in bad loans. In 1989, after eight months of debate, Congress created the Resolution Trust Corp. to make depositors whole, investigate allegations of wrongdoing and deal with the husks of the S&L industry. At the time, skeptics warned that government was reaching too far into the marketplace, and predicted darkly the RTC would be saddled with bad assets for generations. Indeed, the government ended up owning shopping centers, homes and resorts, along with an odd collection of assets put up as collateral for S&L loans, including Picasso and Warhol paintings, a 30-horse merry-go-round, a Colonial-era whiskey distillery, a drawstring made from Martha Washington's gown and 800 units of semen from a registered Brahma bull. By the time the S&L cleanup was over, it had cost U.S. taxpayers about $124 billion in non-inflation-adjusted dollars, according to FDIC research. Mr. Davison, the FDIC historian, wrote in a 2006 journal article: "Perhaps a measure of the RTC's success is that little more than a decade after it closed, this agency that provoked so much debate is now largely forgotten."
