Comment & Debate
Greg Mankiw. “A Defense of the Paulson Plan”. Greg Mankiw Blog. 25 Sept. 2008 – “2. ‘Taxpayers will be better off if Treasury gets warrants.’…This is essentially the assertion made in David Leonhart’s column in the NY Times on Wednesday. And it again illustrates that we would all be better off if high schools taught the Modigliani-Miller theorem. MM implies that the price of the asset (again,assuming the auction gets it right) will adjust to offset the value of any warrants Treasury receives. In this case of a reverse auction, imagine that the price is set at $10. If Treasury instead demands a warrant for future gains of some sort, then the price will rise in the expected amount of the warrant — say that’s $2. Then the price Treasury pays for the asset will be $12. Some people might prefer to get $12 in cash and give up a warrant worth $2 in expected value. Fine, that’s a choice to be made. But the assertion that somehow warrants are needed is simply wrong.”