What about a People's Bank of the United States?

The major business problem is lack of credit - it appears banks are hoarding cash, including the TARP money. So the hell with them - let's create a People's Bank of the United States and just bypass the bastards. Charter the Bank, print money and lend to solvent businesses hurt by the credit crunch. Eventually the banks will want back in because they will want to make money - we'll be stealing potential customers.

I don't know much about that, but it doesn't seem they could scrape up enough money for that.

a buy-out?

you need capital/credit and it's not there. That's one part of the problem.

Each employee will only have to come up with $37,000 to get them through March. It would be a lot less if the retirees want to help as they have a stake in the company's survival, too.

If some of the employees didn't mortgage themselves to the hilt during the spending spree the last few years, there is a chance they actually have some equity in their homes that they could tap to help make the investment.

when forked over hundreds of billions? Just call the warrants, we're now the legal owners and here's how things around going to get done around here....

form labor cooperatives, etc. Best not to break the law!

work, and has been discussed at length on many financial sites, first you FORCE banks to take all assets on balance sheet and mark to market their losses, this would leave many LARGE banks bankrupt! and that would be a problem, solve that problem by creating 10 NEW banks capitalized by the treasury with 50 billion each, with standard fractional reserve banking this would INSTANTLY create 5 TRILLION dollars in new lending capacity ( more than enough to satisfy the credit markets ) let the failed banks liquidate in chapter 11 as the law prescribes, force all credit default swaps onto a regulated exchange and force the trades to clear, if the counterparties cant pay let them go to court and work it out... the 10 new CLEAN banks would then be sold via IPO to the public ( eager for a sound investment ) and the start up capitol paid back over time..

could work, of course there would be losses, common share holders in failed institutions would be wiped out and preferred share holders might get a fraction of their money back or nothing!, bond holders should be O.K. as assets sales should cover them. CDS holders could be a problem but with ALL the bad debts exposed this could be more easily handled. the fed might need to "lend" support to pension funds adversely affected perhaps with some form of loss insurance. the biggest roadblock to this WORKABLE solution is that many billionaires would become millionaires and millionaires would go broke and since THEY are the ones in control!!!! they would much rather the taxpayers cover the losses as is being done under the TARP ( aptly named ) program. they care little for the suffering of working Americans despite what they say in public...

Basically the counterparties can go to hell. You'd have newly capitalized banks to replace the old rotten corrupt failed ones. This would have the advantage of putting the losses squarely on those who engaged in the conduct, or their investors.

Of course, one question is: what is the transaction cost or interim loss to the taxpayer?

Thank you! :)

If it's successful, how big will we allow it to get?

"Too big to fail"? I hope we've learned our lesson on that.

Other than that, I am open to suggestions.

we're only going to hire Dems to run it?

I could care less what party runs it.

Historically speaking, that's been a difficult thing to identify in job candidates.

Got any ideas on how to figure this out?

Very few are going to borrow to expand in a deflationary recession that may well end up going all the way to depression.

The ones who really want to borrow are the ones who need to borrow to survive, i.e. the worst credit risks. Most of these will go under no matter how much they manage to borrow, leaving the lenders in the red - which happens to be precisely the problem that got us to where we are in the first place, too much debt given to those who can't pay them back.

Hmm, where do you expect to get the capital to charter a bank, and the deposits to lend against?

I don't need depositors. The people are my depositors. I can get depositors like any other bank anyway.

The purpose is to spur lending and break the credit crunch. I don't really want to run a bank permanently.