Bankruptcy Is Vital to Capitalism
Già il titolo è tutto un programma......
Da leggere tutto d'un fiato...domandosi perchè, il fiato, non l' abbia trattenuto 20 minuti (ma anche 10 sarebbero stati sufficienti per impedire all' autore di scrivere
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America is relearning an old lesson: Failure and bankruptcy are essential to capitalism.
Bankruptcy is an orderly way to give an overburdened debtor a fresh start and to decide which creditors get paid back and which don't. As Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz teaches: Bankruptcy is a way to cope with those times when markets fail to allocate capital wisely and monitor its use.
In good times, bankruptcy is a way to encourage risk-taking. After all, an economy in which everyone fears trying something that might fail is a stagnant one. But the roots of modern American business bankruptcy date to bad times like today
At the end of the 19th century, nearly 20% of the railroad track belonged to insolvent railroads, says David Skeel, a University of Pennsylvania law professor who has written a history of bankruptcy. With state governments unable to deal with railroads that stretched beyond their borders, and Congress hamstrung by a narrow interpretation of the Constitution, creditors turned to courts. Judges fashioned an approach to divvy up assets among creditors that was codified in an 1898 law, the spirit of which survives today.
General Motors and Chrysler are 21st century analogs of 19th century railroads. They cannot pay their debts; the only issue now is how, not whether, their creditors take a hit. The only difference between GM today and GM in bankruptcy court is that the president and his appointees are making the decisions, instead of a bankruptcy judge constrained by federal law.
Avoiding bankruptcy requires consent of creditors. "In theory, you can do a full bankruptcy through agreement among the parties, but that usually doesn't work," says David Moss, a Harvard Business School professor. "You usually have at least one holdout," in this case GM's bondholders. New Deal changes to the law made cutting deals harder. The view was that an open process with clear rules was more likely to produce a fair result, not one that favored Wall Street types.
With that view in mind, President Barack Obama's critics say the government has no business picking GM's chief executive and apportioning losses among auto workers, pensioners, suppliers and lenders. They fear "politics" will produce unfair or unwise decisions, such as protecting lenders and workers in the domestic auto industry at taxpayer expense while lenders and workers in less politically salient industries suffer.
But sometimes "politics" is just another word for "democracy." The people are having a hard time understanding why big banks and insurers get bailouts and GM gets bankruptcy. It's hard to convince laid-off auto workers that banks and their credit are the vital circulatory system of the U.S. economy, more important than any one industry, even one as large as domestic auto makers. Mr. Obama knows he almost certainly will need more taxpayer money to resuscitate the nation's banks; that won't be popular. If making a very public effort to avoid bankruptcy fails, he will say: I tried, but it just couldn't be done. That may help him get Congress to approve money for the banks.
What about big financial houses, though? Why can't they go through bankruptcy the way Macy's and Delta Air Lines did? One reason is that a retailer or airline can shed debts and then operate stores and airplanes. Financial institutions have nothing so tangible: They basically have their names, their people and their ability to borrow a lot of money short term. All of that can vanish instantly while a judge ponders the matter. So the U.S. devised a bankruptcy substitute for banks: The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. does the deed quickly without a judge.
The Treasury and the Federal Reserve want a similar pseudo-bankruptcy process for big financial institutions to avoid the problems of Lehman Brothers (whose bankruptcy coincided with a bad turn in the crisis and some say caused it) and American International Group (which didn't go into bankruptcy, at substantial cost to taxpayers). They want better choices next time, and they don't think conventional bankruptcy is practical.
Not everyone sees it that way. "The usual reaction if one mentions bankruptcy as a mechanism for addressing a financial institution's default is incredulity," Mr. Skeel and Northwestern University's Kenneth Ayotte wrote recently. "Those who favor the rescue of financial institutions...treat bankruptcy as anathema. Everyone seems to argue that nothing good can come from bankruptcy." They disagree, and would tweak bankruptcy laws to deal with the peculiarities of finance so the rules are clear to all -- and the Treasury secretary and Fed chairman have less discretion.
Bankruptcy is not a death sentence. It's more like an organ transplant. It can save a company's life, but sometimes the patient dies. Bankruptcy is unpleasant and should never be so easy that it encourages foolishness. Headline-making bankruptcies of several brand-name companies at a moment of severe economic crisis can so undermine confidence in the economy that avoiding them makes sense.
But bankruptcy, or some other orderly process to share the pain, is the only way to prevent mistakes and debts of the past from hobbling an economy's future
negativi nelle ultime settimane dall'indice dei noli marittimi che dopo aver varcato quota 2000 è indietreggiato
