Academic

Steven Davidoff considers the question here, and it's a nice analysis of the few tea leaves the statute provides.  A friend of mine speculated that however it values the assets, Treasury should tax the sellers of those that go down in price when they are flipped by the government, and refund the sellers whose assets sell for more.  The advantage of such a scheme is that in principle it would lead to a bailout program that was a wash, I suppose.  Currently, we're not sure if Treasury and the taxpayers will take a massive hit on a bailout (and as Davidoff says, the government is really doubling down on the recovery of the housing market here), or whether it will cut the same sort of pawnbroker/loan shark deals that it did with AIG. Felix Salmon appears to believe Treasury will adopt the latter approach, and, if so, that it should let value investors buy into its distressed assets for less fund.  Heh.