That Sound You Hear Is Investors Chomping at the PPIP

Sound bite by sound bite, investors are starting to come around to the thinking that the Treasury Department’s Public Private Investment Program is a profit waterfall waiting to happen.

There are disparate fragments of evidence that investors are coming around. I just heard Dominic Konstam, the head of interest rate strategy at Credit Suisse, laud the program. A friend of mine yesterday said he is thinking about putting his private money into a fund aimed at investing in the PPIP. Another friend at a hedge fund has modeled an 20% to 30% internal rate of return on PPIP investments. The sharks are circling.

Konstam put it most succinctly, telling Bloomberg that the PPIP offers a “framework where we can make substantial progress.” It all boils down to this: the PPIP will effectively give private investors free put options, Konstam said. I see his point. And if Credit Suisse is correct that about $1 trillion of assets can be classified as toxic ($900 billion of which being loans), then, yes, the math works and the $100 billion of TARP should be sufficient to take those assets out of the system.

Will the price discovery be sufficient for every financial institution? Probably not. But if the inflated price to, say, $0.80 on a the dollar of assets is not enough to cure a bank’s balance sheet, the bank probably doesn’t deserve to remain in business anyway.