Who Needs the PPIP?

Can I just say that I don't care about the public-private investment program? It was a good idea before the stress tests and would have been excellent if all of these banks hadn't raised capital.

But they have.

So now we have to struggle with the notion of the program's relevance. It can be used as a cleanup program for some companies that desperately want to sell down assets to clean up their books, but with the capital raises, none of the major banks should be interested in selling into it.

Perhaps it can be used to figure out something to do with the tortured and changing rules of the game coming from the FDIC, where it looked like private equity was going to be able to buy assets and then it turns out the look was a false one, or a constrained one, or who knows given how mercurial that operation has become. We simply want the FDIC to stop banks from paying high CD rates that can't otherwise and to seize closed banks and give them to other banks.

That's my real hope of the PPIP. When the FDIC seizes a bank, it can throw the crummy stuff to the partnerships and give the good stuff to the good banks. We have many banks, particularly in Illinois and Georgia, where the oversight was pretty nonexistent. If I were FDIC head Sheila Bair, I would be plotting with the PPIP and with a Huntington (HBAN - commentary - Trade Now) or a SunTrust (STI - commentary - Trade Now) to do some bank absorption work.

Otherwise, who needs it? Certainly not Bank of America (BAC - commentary - Trade Now) or Wells Fargo (WFC - commentary - Trade Now) or JPMorgan (JPM - commentary - Trade Now), the normally natural candidates, because they've written down their bad acquired assets already.

Now the mission of the president is to put Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Bair in a room and have a genuine claymation death match where two come in, one goes out.

Then the PPIP might work!

Random musings: The Goldman Sachs (GS - commentary - Trade Now) upgrade this morning by BAC matters, as all the other financials have been taking their cue from this stock...

At the time of publication, Cramer was long Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, JPMorgan and Wells Fargo.

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