– James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

Nationalization of weak banks in Britain and the United States may be preferable to current plans for insurance and soft “bad banks” schemes which risk being swamped by future losses as assets, especially real estate, continue to crater.

An insurance program, getting banks to identify their riskiest assets to the government which will insure them for a fee, is one of the main planks of a UK plan to bail out banks unveiled this week.

Both Citigroup and Bank of America have already received loss protection arrangements from the government. The betting is now that the United States will opt for some sort of a “bad bank” aggregator which will buy up doubtful assets from banks, with the emphasis on keeping as many as possible operating as publicly traded entities which, once shorn of their bad debts, would be viable and would lend.

Both plans keep banks in private hands, which is desirable, and insurance especially is attractive because it has a relatively low upfront cost. But both, and especially insurance, run a real risk of being too small and, by definition, only ridding the banks of assets that are bad now leaving them to founder on new bad loans later.

Commercial and residential real estate in both countries continues to head south at an alarming rate, with falls of as much as 20 percent or more possible in 2009. Those falls won’t be stopped by current lending programs; it is an ongoing crash that could probably be stopped only by some sort of economy-wide debt writedown which is very unlikely.

That means that we could find ourselves in six or nine months in exactly the same situation, but with banks crippled by a new wave of defaults and with the non-financial economy in a much worse state.

In other words, in order to work a bad bank plan must take into state control the weakest banks and probably needs to err on the side of taking the doubtful down along with the basket cases.

“They should probably nationalize now, but not blanket nationalization,” said George Magnus, senior economic adviser to UBS.

“It is by far the cleaner option, take on all the assets and take on all the liabilities and if you find out that in six months time commercial real estate, for example, has dropped 20 percent it is far less of a shock. You don’t have to treat it as a private vehicle which has to be viable.

“Sell the good bits recapitalized back to the market and you can have viable banks far more quickly.”

DEFINING FAILURE

Consultancy Capital Economics is predicting that British house prices will fall another 20 percent in 2009 and that land values contract by 70 percent peak to trough. British commercial property fell 27 percent last year and analysts in December were forecasting an another 16 percent fall this year. Goldman Sachs economist Jan Hatzius believes the U.S. Case-Shiller 20 City index will fall another 20-25 percent by the third quarter of 2010.

Nationalization is not a good outcome; it is failure defined in a word. And nationalizing banks raises the problem of re-privatizing. Who will want to buy banks from a government with a recent track record of what some will inevitably term confiscation? But few would commit capital to banking now, given that governments have been unable to explain how they will treat capital in the banking system.

If banks are to be taken into state control, there needs to be a process to deal with the rights of shareholders; any bank that stays in state control needs to be run at arm’s length; and the period it stays in state control should be as short as possible.

Easy to say, tough to do and no doubt nationalization will have its disasters.

Bank shares have fallen at an appalling rate on both sides of the Atlantic, with several UK banks trading as if they are in danger of being taken into state control. Royal Bank of Scotland, in which the government already has a 70 percent stake, has lost almost 80 percent of its value in January, while Barclays and Lloyds Plc have fallen precipitously. In the United States, Citigroup has more than halved in value in the month despite equity infusions from the government and an insurance wrapper on some of its assets.

But here is where things differ markedly between the United States and Britain. Britain may well need to do more for its banking system than the U.S. and sadly is less well placed to carry it off without nasty side effects.

The dollar is the world’s reserve currency, allowing the United States more leeway in financing its liabilities, and U.S. banks are smaller as compared to their economy. We’ve already seen sterling falling sharply and you can expect further falls as risk is transferred from the private sector to the state.

– At the time of publication James Saft did not own any direct investments in securities mentioned in this article. He may be an owner indirectly as an investor in a fund. For previous columns by James Saft, click here. –

— James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

Government intervention or not, banks will be cutting up America’s credit cards at an unprecedented rate, with grave implications for the economy and company profits.

The U.S. Federal Reserve last week added more nutrition to its alphabet soup of rescue programs when it unveiled the Term Asset-backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF), under which, among other things, it will lend up to $200 billion to investors in securities backed by credit-card, auto and student loans.

It did so for a very good reason: the securitization market’s freeze now extends beyond mortgages, imperiling run-of-the-mill consumer financing and making it a certainty  that many people who use credit to get them over “cash flow” situations will be, well, denied.

And even though the U.S. car industry may implode if starved of finance and many students will have to defer education, the real potential disaster is in credit card funding, which could push lots of households over the brink and in the process consumption and every business which depends on it, which would be all of them.

Put simply, even with an apparent will to try anything to bring the wheels of finance back into motion it will be very difficult for government to quickly fill the hole left by private finance. Details of the plan are still sketchy, but let’s just take it for granted that it works, even if the plan, at only one year, will give them huge fears about how they get out of their positions at the end of 2009.

Beyond that, the Fed is seeking to kick start securitization by attracting back a species of investors, leveraged ones, who don’t really exist any more.

All other things being equal, the amount the Fed is putting into the TALF should take the ABS market back to about where it was in the first half of 2008, which itself was only a third of the volume we saw in 2007.

But all other things are not equal.

The banks that provide the bulk of credit card funding  generally want to cut back, pushed by their own woes, a conservative read of the economic situation and, potentially, regulatory changes that, while intended to ward off the excesses of the last bubble, will magnify the impact of its bursting.

Meredith Whitney, the Oppenheimer and Co analyst who has so far been ahead in identifying and explaining the weaknesses in the banking system, thinks over $2 trillion of credit lines, or 45 percent of lines available, will be pulled out from under American consumers in the next 18 months, a figure that puts the Fed’s $200 billion for asset backed finance in its proper perspective.

“We are now entering a new era within the financial landscape that will be characterized by expanded forced consumer de-leveraging with a pronounced downshift in consumer spending,” she wrote in a research note.

“We view the credit card as the second key source of consumer liquidity, the first being their jobs. Pulling credit at a time when job losses are increasing by over 50 percent year-on-year in most key states is a dangerous and unprecedented combination, in our view.”

BIG BANKS ALL WANT TO CUT BACK

Whitney notes that the three largest credit card lenders, Bank of America, Citigroup and JP Morgan, who between them account for more than half of U.S. credit card outstandings, have each discussed reducing card exposure or slowing growth. Capital One and American Express, who are another 14.5 percent, have also talked about limiting lending.

That will set the tone for the rest of the industry, which will be grappling with new regulation that, if goes ahead as planned, will impair profitability of credit card lending and push more off-balance sheet securitizations back on to the banking industry’s already strained books.

Cutting back on abusive lending and forcing banks to recognize and account for the risks they take are surely good things, but will have the perverse effect of making the credit crunch worse, at least temporarily.

And looking at the balance sheets of individual Americans, there is good reason to think that the credit crunch should get worse: that they should consume and borrow less and save more. I’d argue that far from being non-functioning, financial markets are closer to pricing in the true risk of lending to consumers now with credit cards charging about 10 percentage points more than 5-year Treasuries than they were six months ago when it was only about a 7.65 percentage point gap.

But the mother of all unintended side effects is that the faster consumers cut back, the worse it will be.

The kind of consumer cut back implied by the consumer credit crunch that now looks likely would blow a hole below the waterline in the U.S. economy, and in U.S. company profits and the stocks that reflect them.

The Federal Reserve and U.S. government’s use of unconventional measures is only just beginning.

–  At the time of publication James Saft did not own any direct investments in securities mentioned in this article. He may be an owner indirectly as an investor in a fund. For more columns by James Saft, click here. –

For full coverage of the crisis in credit, click here.