Monday, March 23, 2009

IT'S NOT JUST US DFH WHO THINK GEITHNER BLEW IT

(h/t Atrios)

It's also a member of the banksters' own world:
Bank of America’s Bernstein Says Sell Bank Stocks After Rally

By Eric Martin

March 23 (Bloomberg) -- Investors should sell bank stocks after they rallied 12 percent today because the Treasury Department’s plan to buy toxic assets won’t stop profits from dropping, Bank of America Corp.’s Richard Bernstein said.

Removing devalued loans and securities from banks’ balance sheets is a short-term solution that will delay the problem’s ultimate solution, which is bank takeovers, Bernstein said. The government won’t be able to inflate the prices banks receive for selling bad assets indefinitely, he added.

“The history of bubbles shows quite well that financial sector consolidation is inevitable,” Bernstein, Bank of America’s chief investment strategist, wrote in a research note. “Financial stocks will be attractive when the government tries to speed up that inevitable process. However, to the contrary, the government continues to attempt to stymie that inevitable consolidation.”

Bernstein compared the U.S. plan to Japan’s response in the 1990s, when the government, faced with public opposition to its bailouts of banks, waited before trying to fix its financial system. That resulted in the “Lost Decade,” in which economic growth averaged less than 1 percent a year and the unemployment rate more than doubled.

The Obama administration unveiled its plan to remove toxic assets from the books of the nation’s banks earlier, betting that it can revive the U.S. financial system without resorting to outright nationalization.

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