Wednesday, October 01, 2008

My financial crisis solutions

I wanted to share with you my opinion about what is going on with the financial crisis. The past few days, we have seen that the crisis has grown big time, with banks nationalized on both sides of the Atlantic ocean, and with some new job cuts from big banks like UBS.

First of all I wanted to tell you that I am totally against the Paulson's plan. I think this is silly to get $700 billion in the crisis, without even solving the biggest problems of the crisis.

  • Find a global solution: This is a global crisis, affecting all the economies of the world. the United States started the crisis, but now it blossomed in Japan, Spain, Belgium, and without any doubt it should affect China soon, as Chinese companies have invested a lot in US funds. Therefore, it is important to find a global solution. the greatest economical powers, including the US, France, Germany, England among others, should meet up and discuss potential solutions to the problem. These discussions should also includes a potential budget, that would be used to insure the financial health of main institutions.

  • What is going with the IMF? Aren't they suppose to react during financial crisis? There is a liquidity crisis and they have the biggest reserve in the world. I think they should act as soon as possible in order to limit the crisis, and participate to the solving. Actually, I have just checked their websites and they are both preparing a meeting with finance ministers, and raised $1 trillion to inject in the financial markets.

  • Focus on how to help the US real estate market: The crisis started there, and there are still much trouble there. About 2 million houses went on foreclosure the past year. I think this is one of the key of the problem. That is a place where you have potential value. I think that the US government should spend their $700 billion dollars in the housing market buying foreclosed houses instead of spending it into a market that anyway have much chance to waste it. When the US government will own houses, they could have specific plans to lend these apartments for small amounts of money, and after a while (10 years?), as a leasing system, the renter could have an option to buy the house. That would help a lot of US citizens, stop the foreclosure crisis, and secure some of the loans that are still going in limbo.

These would be my main focus to solve this crisis. We are not at the end of it, but this is not the beginning either. Hopefully this is the beginning of the end.

What do you think about it. What would you do?