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Bank Rescue Plan Gelling

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The Associated Press

Published: March 21, 2009

WASHINGTON - Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner could announce as soon as Monday his much-anticipated plan to get toxic assets off the books of the country's struggling banks, administration and industry officials said.

The plan will use the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to make the resources of the government's $700 billion financial rescue fund go further, the officials said Friday.

Geithner is being forced to tap the Fed and the FDIC for support because the prospects for getting additional support from Congress for the bailout effort have dimmed significantly given the recent uproar over millions of dollars in bonuses provided to troubled insurance giant American International Group, the largest recipient of government support.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the Geithner's plan, said it will have three major parts:

•Use the bailout fund to create a public-private partnership to back purchases of bad assets by private investors.

•Expand a recently launched program being run by the Federal Reserve called the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility. That program is providing loans for investors to buy assets backed by consumer debt in an effort to make it easier for consumers to get auto, student and credit card loans. Under Geithner's proposal, this program would be expanded to support investors' purchases of banks' toxic assets.

•Use the resources of the FDIC, the agency that guarantees bank deposits, to purchase toxic assets.

When Geithner announced the administration's overhaul of the rescue program on Feb. 10, he only mentioned using the bailout fund to support the private-public partnership, and he was vague on details of that program.

Geithner's new plan would tap the resources of the Fed and the FDIC to attack what many analysts see as the major failing of the bank rescue effort to date, the failure to rid banks' of more than $1 trillion in bad loans and other toxic assets weighing down their books.

The administration included a placeholder in its budget request in February for up to $750 billion more in rescue money, more than doubling the current commitment, but the uproar over AIG bonuses has underscored the fading chance that Congress would vote to bolster the current fund.

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