Alan Greenspan said it was a bad idea. So did Warren Buffett. And, the bank "Super Fund" created to save troubled SIVs died before it saw the light of day.
According to MarketWatch, "the master liquidity enhancement conduit, or M-LEC, originally envisaged as an $80 billion to $100 billion fund, won't be rolled out because the so-called structured investment vehicles it was meant to bailout out either aren't interested in the plan or have tackled their problems in other ways."
The company with the biggest need for short-term loans from the fund was Citigroup (NYSE: C). When it took a number of its SIVs onto its own balance sheet much of the motivation behind the program was gone.
And, it is a good thing. The "Super Fund" would have made loans that could have disguised the real current value of the mortgage-related securities in the SIVs instead of letting their market value be determined by what they could be sold for in an open market.
Th Treasury Department backed the plan and several banks spent a great deal of time on it. Those are countless lost hours spent on something which may have been doomed from the start.
Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.
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