>>>>>http://assets.sunlightfoundation.com/pdf/eesa2008.pdf
>>>>>
>>>>>The goal of the bill should be to prevent system meltdown while people and institutions that made foolish bets loose their money and those that cooked the documents go to jail.
>>>>>
>>>>>There doesn't seem to be a mechanism in the bill to determine a reasonably discounted price for the items sold to the Govt, so it seems true that the bill needs more work before approval.
>>>>
>>>>There's the rub. One of the reasons for the crisis is nobody knows what some of this stuff is worth.
>>>
>>>But it certainly is not 100%. I am not clear on what what a reverse auction is exactly. Can someone explain?
>>
>>Reverse auction means that a purchaser (government, in this case) comes out and say "I want to buy $100M securities today" and various banks (sellers) start bidding process, e.g. 1st bank says I am ready to deliver 10 pounds of paper for this price, the next guy says 15 pounds and so on. Whoever promises to deliver more paper will get the money. As you see, without non-existent mechanism to figure out how much the paper worth it can be measured by weight (pounds) or any other arbitrary way invented on fly.
>
>Hope there is a more relevant way to rate these things than weighing them so that auctions can be for a certain type of security only each time. That puts pressure on holders to bid seriously because they know their next chance to bid may not be for many months. Maybe even introduce a chance element on when. Game theory tipe of thing.
>
>I can see how if it is done right and *transparently* the program need not cost the government a whole bunch of money in the long run.

Great majority of these securities are credit-default swaps and other derivatives. Besides inherent complexity (derivative is a kind of security which value depends on another security dynamics and these derivatives are stacked to unlimited levels) making transparent classification difficult, one should also remember that market currently assigns about zero valuation to these securities, that's exactly the problem, so any other way to assign value to them would have to be artificial. Once bought by government, this paper would have value just in case government legislates the backward process, i.e. banks will have to accept it back at certain cost.