Bailout approval starts new debate over implementation

Congressional approval of the $700 billion bailout last week marks the beginning of a new debate over how to prevent a similar financial crisis from happening again.

“The $700 billion rescue plan is a life-support measure. It may keep our economy from collapsing, but it won’t make it healthy again,” said Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), after he brought to order the first of five hearings his committee will hold in the coming weeks concerning the financial crisis.

{mosads}“To restore our economy to health, two steps are necessary. First, we must identify what went wrong. Then we must enact real reform of our financial markets.”

Treasury, meanwhile, moved Monday to implement the rescue plan by releasing a solicitation to financial services firms that would be paid to manage what will become the department’s massive new portfolio.

Treasury also defined conflict-of-interest rules that will govern participation in the program.

Lobbyists, who largely watched from the sidelines as administration officials and congressional leaders negotiated the broad terms of the bailout behind closed doors, are now moving to play a larger role in this new phase, which they expect to dominate public policy discussions on Capitol Hill for years.

Several law firms hastily combined heretofore disparate practices into new financial services “task forces” to market their expertise in not only government relations but also the Byzantine world of tax and banking regulations, government contracting and securities law to current and prospective clients.

“This will ripple through every piece of major legislation we are looking at next Congress,” said Rich Gold, the head of Holland and Knight’s government relations and regulatory practice. “This is a paradigm shift.”

“Lobbying is just the tip of the iceberg,” Gold said.

Even with the bailout package approved, there are a number of issues outstanding. What criteria will Treasury use to determine which illiquid mortgage-backed assets it will buy? Who will manage the huge portfolio created by the bailout? How will the pricing of assets affect the value of assets held by other firms that choose not to participate in the government program, a fight over so-called mark-to-market accounting rules?

“Congress stopped the bleeding; now the question is, What happens next?” said one financial services lobbyist.

Lobbyists describe the effect on public policy by using the same dramatic adjectives and metaphors economists use to describe the precarious state of the economy. The public policy fallout of the current crisis is historic and far-reaching and unprecedented, lobbyists say.

“It would be disingenuous to suggest that, in my lifetime, anything of this magnitude has happened to a segment of the economy,” said Patrick Oxford, the chairman of Bracewell & Giuliani, which like Holland and Knight created a financial services task force.

In a release announcing the creation of the task force, Bracewell said that it was designed to “assist market participants in their efforts to navigate one of the most significant governmental actions in the history of the U.S. economy.”

The speed at which the administration insisted Congress pass the bailout bill minimized the role most lobbyists played in the development of the package.

Oxford said last week that about all he and other lobbyists could do was “turn off the TV and just see what happens.”

Now that the debate moves to Treasury, there will be a “much higher level of policy discussions about what works and what doesn’t in the marketplace,” he said. “This is very much a work in progress.”

“Treasury can do pretty much whatever it wants, whenever it wants and however it wants,” said Scott Sinder, the chairman of Steptoe and Johnson’s government affairs and public policy practice. Steptoe also announced a new financial services task force last week.

In addition to their work before Treasury, lobbyists are working with members and congressional aides as they begin to craft a long-term response to the current crisis. The last hearing Waxman has scheduled so far on the crisis will solicit thought from regulators about how a future financial crisis can be avoided.

Outside groups are already pushing their own remedies. The Financial Services Roundtable, a group that includes large banks, brokers and insurers, wants Congress to create a position within the Federal Reserve that would be responsible for weighing risk that firms or transactions pose to the overall financial system.

The Roundtable also wants Congress to allow insurance companies to get a federal charter, which advocates argue would enable the government to keep better track of their fiscal health as well.

But it opposes efforts Democrats are likely to make next year to allow bankruptcy judges to reduce the mortgages to reflect the declining value of homes. Critics say that will raise mortgage rates of other homeowners.