A Ghoulish Prospect

摘要

In A classic horror film, "Night of the Living Dead", a terrified group of people barricade themselves in a rural farmhouse to escape hordes of flesh-eating zombies. Today Americans are gripped by a similar fear, but this time the walking corpses in their nightmares are banks, tearing insatiably at the public purse. As the Obama administration struggles to get its poorly received bank-rescue plan up and running, it is being pressed to respond to suspicions that some large banks are on the edge of insolvency, if not already there.rnIn a matter of weeks nationalisation has gone from taboo to talking point. Economists debate its pros and cons across the blogosphere. Politicians on both left and right accept that America's sickest banks may need to be taken over and restructured and their good parts returned to private ownership. Even Alan Greenspan has become an advocate.rnAlthough the government continues to resist such calls, its hand may be forced by the results of the "stress tests" that it began to perform on February 25th on the 19 largest banks. Officials' own stress levels are running in inverse relation to the banks' share prices. Those of Citigroup and Bank of America plumbed new lows on February 20th (see chart 1). That prompted thernTreasury and a group of regulators to declare that they stood "firmly" behind the banking system, but that their "strong presumption" was that banks would remain in private hands. Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, went further, saying in congressional testimony this week that nationalisation "is when the government seizes the bank and zeroes out the shareholders.. .we don't plan anything like that."