From Bloomberg:

U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke proposed moving troubled assets from the balance sheets of American financial companies into a new institution.

Congressional leaders who met with Paulson and Bernanke late yesterday in Washington said they aim to pass legislation soon. The initiative is aimed at removing the devalued mortgage- linked assets at the root of the worst credit crisis since the Great Depression. Today, the Treasury announced a $50 billion program to insure the holdings of money-market mutual funds for a year.

The effort is a recognition that Paulson’s and Bernanke’s earlier efforts failed to revive financial and housing markets. The government took over American International Group Inc., Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the past 12 days, a period when Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. filed for bankruptcy and Americans pulled a record $89 billion from money-market funds.

and:

The Treasury has pledged to buy up to $200 billion of Fannie and Freddie stock to keep them solvent, while the Fed agreed Sept. 16 to an $85 billion bridge loan to AIG. The Treasury also plans to buy $5 billion of mortgage-backed debt this month under an emergency program.

“It sounds like there’s going to be a giant dumpster for illiquid assets,” said Mirko Mikelic, senior portfolio manager at Fifth Third Asset Management in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which oversees $22 billion in assets. “It brings up the more troubling question of whether the U.S. government is big enough to take on this whole problem, relative” to the size of the American economy, he said.

Dumpster indeed, and it’s going to be the taxpayers of this country responsible for taking out that trash.

Dumpster 2, originally uploaded by Descriptimage.