Everywhere I’ve turned these last few weeks, I’ve heard variations of the same refrain. “The original Paulson plan had it right — they had to get the bad assets off the banks,” said Ronald J. Kruszewski, the chief executive of the investment firm of Stifel Nicolaus & Company. “Before you are going to get intelligent capitalists to invest their money in the banks, you have to get these landmines off their balance sheets,” said Brett Duval Fromson, the managing partner of the Margin of Safety Fund. “The reason things are frozen is that nobody knows if the banks are insolvent or not — thanks to the bad assets on their books,” said Henry F. Owsley of the Gordian Group, an investment bank that specializes in “distressed situations.”
