September 23, 2008

Lehman and the Bailout

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LEHMAN AND THE BAILOUT….Was last week’s financial crisis caused by the Fed’s decision to allow Lehman Brothers to go into bankruptcy? I’m not sure, but here’s the basic argument in favor of this scenario:

  1. Monday: Fed allows Lehman to go bankrupt.

  2. Tuesday: Reserve Prime, a money market fund with exposure to Lehman securities, announces that it has “broken the buck.” Money market funds are supposed to be the safest places possible to park your cash outside of T-bills, so this causes a panic.

  3. Wednesday: Depositers start making large-scale withdrawals from other money market funds. Banks need to service these withdrawals, so they begin hoarding cash and calling in their short-term loans (excess reserves held by banks increased last week from a normal $2 billion to nearly $200 billion). Every bank is doing the same thing, so no money is available for normal interbank loans. LIBOR skyrockets.

  4. Later Wednesday: with everyone hoarding cash, the credit markets seize up completely. The commercial paper market, which funds actual operations of actual companies, is close to death. The entire financial system is near collapse.

  5. Thursday: Bernanke and Paulson announce their bailout plan. This reduces the panic that banks will go bust and thereby frees up the credit markets a bit.

More details here. If I understand everything correctly, Bernanke and Paulson basically took a look at what happened after they allowed Lehman to collapse and decided it couldn’t happen again. Hence the bailout.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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