@ Supply Chain Management

I’m sure that you’re drowning in the much bandied about term – Credit crisis or Credit crunch or liquidity crisis or the like. And I’ve come across some explanations of what event or series of events underlie this crisis. For a very good explanation of the problem and the failed bailout by the current Treasury Secretary Paulson, I refer you to this site – Understanding Tax.

As I pointed out in the previous post – Are you ready for the Supply Chain Shock?, a credit crisis is not a laughing matter and a serious credit crisis will send numerous shocks through the numerous supply chains of the world. The author of the article also points that out,

You might think of short-term money as the lubricant that keeps the world’s economic engine turning over smoothly. If there’s no lubricant,the engine freezes. No paydays, no goods on the shelves. Seriously.

So what is the purpose of the bailout bill? Let’s be clear about the probable scope of the current crisis – it’s not going away tomorrow if the bill is somehow passed in the House.

Note that Mr. Paulson’s proposal was not intended to solve the teaser-rate mortgage problem, either now or in the future. In the transactions that created the teaser-rate mortgages in the first place,both parties made bad decisions – the lender and the borrower. Mr.Paulson’s proposal was not intended to help either. One of its unavoidable side effects, however, was to relieve lenders of the consequences of their bad decisions, while leaving borrowers to suffer the consequences of theirs. This made it politically less palatable.
In addition, at least $500 billion more of teaser-rate mortgages are scheduled to reset over the next several years. In all likelihood, they too will go into default and become toxic waste. Nothing in Mr.Paulson’s original proposal was intended to do anything about this next$500 billion installment – or, indeed, to prevent lenders from making more teaser-rate mortgages in the future.
Similarly, Mr. Paulson’s proposal was not intended as a general Wall Street bail- out, although to some extent it would have had that effect.Note that the outstanding overhang of credit default swaps alone is estimated to be between $45 and $60 trillion – three to four times the size of our annual gross domestic product. The requested $700 billion, although the single biggest appropriation request in U.S.history, was miniscule when compared with the toxic waste problem as a whole. Mr. Paulson’s proposed solution was to cost just 1% of the size of the problem and was aimed only at a small part of that problem. (It is unnerving to realize that the U.S. government – the