An additional thought about this scheme that escaped me in my original post. It wasn’t just about saving the banks by taking all the under water bonds off their hands. It was even more importantly, a program to allow the banks to buy new bonds issued by the treasury, to finance the government debt going forward. A brilliant and devious scheme, to in effect have the FED buy the bonds(which they aren’t suppose to do) in a back door way. The banks buy the bonds with a guarantee by the FED to take that paper off their hands if rates go higher. A no lose deal for the banks and a back door way for the FED to keep buying the Treasury issuance.