Paulson bailout didn’t give taxpayers what Goldman gave Buffett

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: Henry Paulson may be the most powerful manager of money in the world and he still couldn’t do for taxpayers with the $700 billion bailout of American banks what Warren Buffett did for his shareholders in investing in Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

The Treasury secretary has made 174 purchases of banks’ preferred shares that include certificates to buy stock at a later date. He invested $10 billion in Goldman Sachs in October, twice as much as Buffett did the month before, yet gained warrants worth one-fourth as much as the billionaire, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The Goldman Sachs terms were repeated in most of the other bank bailouts.

Paulson’s warrant deals may give U.S. taxpayers, who are funding the bailouts, less profit from any recovery in financial stocks than shareholders such as Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein and Saudi Arabian Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, owner of 4 percent of Citigroup Inc., said Simon Johnson, former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund.

The transactions are “just egregious,” said Johnson, a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “You want to do it the way Warren does it.” Paulson’s decisions mark the first time in the nation’s 236- year history that the U.S. government has had to prop up the financial system by purchasing shares in institutions from Goldman Sachs, the most profitable Wall Street firm last year, to Saigon National Bank, a Westminster, California, lender with a market value of $3.8 million.

Giving Money Away

“Paulson said he had to make it attractive to banks, which is code for ‘I’m going to give money away,’” said Joseph Stiglitz, who won a Nobel Prize in 2001 for his work on the economic value of information.

“The worst aspect of this is that they were designed not to do what they were supposed to do,” he said in a telephone interview from Paris Jan. 7. “In many ways, it’s not only a giveaway, but a giveaway that was designed not to work.”

The Treasury would have held warrants for 116 million shares of Goldman Sachs under Buffett’s terms, which would be equivalent to a 21 percent stake when added to those currently outstanding. Instead, the dilution is 2.7 percent under the Treasury plan. Blankfein is the company’s biggest individual investor, with 2.08 million shares worth about $178 million today, according to Bloomberg data. His 0.47 percent interest would have declined to 0.36 percent under Buffett’s terms and would be 0.44 percent if the Treasury’s warrants were exercised.

Treasury spokeswoman Brookly McLaughlin wouldn’t say how the bailout conditions were set.

“Obviously, the government is going to have different objectives than a private investor,” McLaughlin said in an e- mail. “The main idea was not to turn a profit on Day One, but to provide stabilizing capital.”

Changes to TARP

Senator Judd Gregg, a New Hampshire Republican, estimated in a Jan. 4 Wall Street Journal opinion article that TARP investments have earned about $8 billion while recapitalizing the banking system.

Government agencies have committed more than $8.5 trillion to shoring up the financial system, including the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program signed into law Oct. 3 by President George W. Bush. TARP was originally sold to Congress as a way to buy securities that had fallen in market value. Paulson shifted his emphasis to direct capital injections to banks to prevent the financial sector from foundering.

The House Financial Services Committee and TARP Congressional Oversight Panel plan hearings on how federal bailout money will be used during the administration of President-elect Barack Obama. The financial services panel scheduled its meeting for Jan. 13.

‘Something Worth Nothing’

“We believe the public has a right to know the value of the investments being made with the TARP funds and whether the terms Treasury receives for investing taxpayer dollars are as good as those that private individuals like Warren Buffett receive for similar investments,” said Elizabeth Warren, chairwoman of the TARP Congressional Oversight Panel, in an e-mail. “This is a question we will continue to ask until we get a complete answer.”

Stiglitz said finance professionals at Treasury possessed expertise on warrant pricing that members of Congress didn’t.