Nationalize Insolvent Banks

by Nouriel Roubini

A year ago I predicted that losses by U.S. financial institutions would be at least $1 trillion and possibly as high as $2 trillion.

At that time, the consensus was that such estimates were gross exaggerations--the naïve optimists had in mind about $200 billion of expected subprime mortgage losses. But, as I pointed out, losses would rapidly mount well beyond subprime mortgages as the U.S. and global economy spun into a severe financial crisis and ugly recession.

I argued that we would see rising losses on subprime, near-prime and prime mortgages; commercial real estate; credit cards, auto loans and student loans; industrial and commercial loans; corporate bonds, sovereign bonds and state and local government bonds; and massive losses on all of the assets--collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), collateralized loan obligations, asset-backed securities and the entire alphabet of credit derivatives--that had securitized such loans.