Bondholders v. Taxpayers

Update: Durbin: Bankers "own" the U.S. Congress

This is an idea gaining increasing currency on making banks healthy, wealthy and lending.

See Reorganising the banks: Focus on the liabilities, not the assets, and Henry Blodget in TechTicker:

From The Business Insider, April 29, 2009:
We are pleased to discover that we're no longer shouting down a rain barrel.

The idea that the government should draw on a massive pot of money available to fix the banks that is NOT coming from the U.S. taxpayer is finally going mainstream!

Today, the NYT's David Leonhardt has devoted an entire column to the idea of making bondholders -- the people who lent the banks the money that they incinerated -- pay for some of the cost of fixing them.

What's more, Leonhardt says that Larry Summers actually mentioned this as a possibility in a TV interview.

Politically, it's not difficult to see how this approach might take the air out of the Republicans' getting all populist on us.

Take this approach combined with the Geithner project, described by Chadwick Matlin as: "A healthy derivative market leads to a healthy bank leads to a healthy economy leads to a healthy life," and you can see some light and a lot of room for Democrats to move right over the Republicans and out of their Battered Wife Syndrome.

Let the Republicans say no, no and get downright abusive and Democrats can get the country moving again.