Watch Your Wallet

Ordinarily, you would not hand $100 to your broker to invest on your behalf without some idea of how he or she would invest your money. You would be even less likely to hand over your cash to someone planning to invest it in illiquid assets with no established market prices. However, the original version of the government bailout plan, released on Thursday last week, handed $700 billion of taxpayer money to Treasury to invest in mortgage-backed securities at any price it saw fit.

Our Washington Post op-ed article discusses this governance question and floats a few possible solutions that could align incentives properly and promote transparency. At the same time, opposition from both sides of the aisle on Capitol Hill has greatly increased the chances that some form of improved governance will be included in the final plan. In following the ongoing debate, however, it will be important to make sure that there are adequate mechanisms for setting prices objectively and transparently, or else the opportunity for abuse will remain.

• Op-ed