The assets have value - its just that no one knows what it is. A long-term investor, like Warren Buffet or the Treasury agency that will be responsible for doing the sorting, will have the time to figure out what that value is - since Wall Street seems to focus too much on short term results, they sure as heck aren't going to do it. The current CBO estimate on the bailout's final cost (without the Christmas tree ornaments) is on the order of $20B profit to $20B loss.
I just don't buy that. Consider the people who have racked up these debts: people who exploited the system to get money and a free home for a while and people who were exploited by the banking system and got a bad mortgage.
Of the former, the banks receive foreclosed properties. Now, they've
been trying to auction this stuff off, and it's just not happening. There was a story about it on 60 minutes where there was an auction of a bunch of houses (I want to say about 50, this was a couple years back) where few of them never even got a bid on them, and then they showed a map of the foreclosed properties the bank owned (i want to say about 200) represented by blue dots and green dots: blue dots were houses to be put up for auction, green dots were houses that were put up for auction and nobody bid on them.
Of the latter, these people have been sinking a lot of money into their mortgages already, and bankruptcies are happening. In other words, these people have all debts and no money and the government is proposing to buy up that debt. It'd have to be a pretty damn sweet deal for me to even consider touching these debts.
