Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Looting of the Irish: Irish 'bad bank' NAMA should be sold in one go [update]

The Telegraph reports

Ireland should sell the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) in its entirety once the body has made significant progress in disposing of the toxic property loans it took on from the country’s banks.
More specifically,

A secret report prepared for NAMA, which holds about €75bn (£64bn) of bad debt, said the organisation could be sold as a single entity and also recommended it take direct control of loans currently managed by Irish banks. 
NAMA was set up as a “bad bank” in the midst of Ireland’s banking crisis to enable the country to create new banks unencumbered with toxic loans. 
The emergence of the NAMA report comes as European banks face the need to dispose of a pool of toxic assets larger than the entire British economy if they are to return to profitability and meet new capital rules. 
Estimates from accountants Deloitte found that European banks hold more than £1.5 trillion of non-core and non-performing assets on their balance sheets.
So is the advice in the report to sell as quickly as possible to get out in front of the wave of bad assets that the European banking system is trying to sell off?

Is this advice likely to produce a high or low price for the NAMA assets?

Update
The Telegraph ran an article on the head of NAMA.   The article observed that the goal is not to sell NAMA now but to manage the assets to try to maximize their value.

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