Another Vote For Plan N

While Wall Street and the financial world mulls over Tim Geithner's statement that he may indeed get tough and fire executives of bailed out companies, TARP Oversight Panel chair Elizabeth Warren has officially suggested that America should go the full Plan N route.

A congressional panel overseeing the U.S. financial rescue suggested that getting rid of top executives and liquidating problem banks may be a better way to solve the economic crisis.

The Congressional Oversight Panel, in a report released yesterday, also said the Treasury may be relying on too rosy an economic scenario to guide its $700 billion bailout, and declared that the success of the program after six months is “mixed.” Three of the group’s members disagreed with at least some of the findings.

“All successful efforts to address bank crises have involved the combination of moving aside failed management and getting control of the process of valuing bank balance sheets,” the panel, headed by Harvard Law School Professor Elizabeth Warren, said in its report.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has revamped the Troubled Asset Relief Program to focus on injecting capital into banks and removing up to $1 trillion in illiquid securities from their balance sheets via public-private investment partnerships. The government is also working to unfreeze credit markets through a Federal Reserve program that provides loans to investors in some asset-backed securities.

Warren, in an interview on Bloomberg Television, said yesterday that while “things may be getting a little better” under Geithner, the Treasury still needs to be more transparent about how it is spending the taxpayers’ money.

“We still have a long way to go, a very long way,” she said.

A long way indeed, but Elizabeth Warren is a woman after my own heart, for sure. The pressure is growing for Plan N to be implemented, but everything depends on the results of the bank stress tests being fair and brutally objective to identify the banks that need to be targets of Plan N.

With ample evidence however that the stress tests are just a dog and pony show, it's looking more and more like Plan N will be avoided at all costs until it's either the last option, or worse, far too late to implement it.