BloggingStocks

Cramer on BloggingStocks: The beauty of the plan

Posted Sep 23rd 2008 8:58AM by Jim CramerJim Cramer RSS Feed
Filed under: Market Matters, Columns, Citigroup Inc. (C), JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Goldman Sachs Group (GS), Morgan Stanley (MS), Washington Mutual (WM), Cramer on BloggingStocks


TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says there are some events out there -- WaMu being the biggest -- that make the plan worth adopting.

The vote from Monday's market was pretty resounding: The plan won't help. Or if it does, it will be too costly and there are too many details that can't be worked out.

So should it just be let go?

I am a big believer in the plan because there are some events out there that would make the plan worth adopting no matter what. And the biggest event is Washington Mutual (NYSE: WM) (Cramer's Take). Here's a firm that just had its debt downgraded again last night, and if you read the ratings downgrades you can't see how the feds can avoid seizing it.

But what happens when they seize it? The thing is so mammoth that it would overwhelm the FDIC. Although with this administration's magic-wand philosophy, maybe we can just get some stopgap funding. Or maybe we just say, "As long as there are no lines outside WM, we are fine." But at a certain point, no investors are going to want to buy any of this company's debt and the losses could be too great.


With the plan, another entity can buy them, and write the mortgages down to the level where they could be sold to the resolution mortgage trust and take the deposits. If you are Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) (Cramer's Take) or Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) (Cramer's Take), overnight you become a gigantic deposit institution and you do not have to take a hit on the mortgages. It solves a lot of problems.

Now, I know it creates a lot of problems, but as if anyone wasn't aware of this, every alternative creates a lot of problems. If it didn't, we would have solved this by now.

In a world with no plan, though, with no place to put the mortgages, the FDIC goes broke, people panic about their deposits, and we have 1932. We have the Great Depression scenario.

We can quibble all we want about the plan, we can delay the inevitable with Washington Mutual by having them just be on life support -- with the Fed helping -- but this is the largest stand-alone repository of bad mortgages, and it is about to come due.

The major rap against the plan is simple: price discovery.

Right now, the mortgages can be hidden within a bank structure. Arguably, that's not even true. Banks should be disclosing everything. When I read articles about how Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley can now hide their bad assets in the commercial side of the ledger, I cringe.

All institutions are supposed to admit what's performing and what's not performing and where those nonperformers are from and what they are like. All of them. I read these articles and my head is spinning.

Being a commercial bank just makes it, without deposits, so Morgan Stanley and Goldman can return prime brokerage account monies to clients without going belly-up. A commercial banking license is not a license to make as many bad loans and own as many bad pieces of paper possible.

It is possible that Goldman can match bad investments against good deposits, but, again, Goldman's problem was not bad assets -- it wasn't losing money -- but prime brokerage exiting.

The deposits of Washington Mutual would take care of that, but so would the Fed, which as of Monday can just lend Goldman the money for those exiting the prime brokerage.

No, the beauty of the plan is that those deposits are worth a great deal, that they give your organization more room to make more loans, even though the loans are a lower percentage of your capital.

The big short rap on the New Goldman is that it can't lever 22-to-1, but if it had Washington Mutual's deposits it could lever up at probably like 2- or 3-to-1 and still have lots more room than it has, although there are rules about how much of that capital you can risk.

Right now, the presumption with a Citigroup (NYSE: C) (Cramer's Take) or a JPMorgan (NYSE: JPM) (Cramer's Take) is that they can pretty much do whatever they want with however much they want -- true or false, that is the perception. In other words, commercial banks are perceived to have the same amount of opportunity to lever as investment banks with less risk, so they are better investments.

The main issue here is that without the plan, Washington Mutual could be the tipping point. With the plan, it won't cascade.

Right now, there are supposed to be five bidders for Washington Mutual. I don't believe it. I think it's chimerical. Without the plan approved, I don't know why anyone would buy WaMu. This is where the rubber hits the road.

-----------------------
RELATED LINKS:
WaMu Deal Could Take Time
Cramer: A Way Out of This Mess
-----------------------

Jim Cramer is a director and co-founder of TheStreet.com. He contributes daily market commentary for TheStreet.com's sites and serves as an adviser to the company's CEO. At the time of publication, Cramer was long Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan.

Tags: bailout, c, citigroup, featured, goldman sachs, GoldmanSachs, gs, jim cramer, JimCramer, jpm, jpmorgan, morgan stanley, MorganStanley, ms, wamu, washington mutual, WashingtonMutual, wm

Print this

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Page Loaded in 1328856594841 ms.