Fobaproa would be helping lots of ordinary people instead of a few of the rich.
Last week the government announced that it will shut down its bank restructuring agency, Fobaproa.
So the government, like any pantomime hero, asked its audience to help it kill Fobaproa.
Whoever runs the central bank is supposed to sit on the board of son-of-Fobaproa too.
Fobaproa also failed adequately to punish bank shareholders, who should normally take first hit in any bail-out.
Even before the international turmoil, the delay in resolving the Fobaproa dispute was slowing the banks' recovery.
Some of the claims Fobaproa had taken over were fraudulent: the debtors had never intended to pay.
Alas, in its haste to keep the banks alive, Fobaproa did not scrutinise the loan-books it was swallowing.
It rejected as illegal the conversion of the Fobaproa debt into public debt.
The biggest mistakes were in the operation of the Mexican government agency, Fobaproa, that bought bad loans from troubled banks.
In the end it seems likely to approve a budget without money for Fobaproa, and let the saga drag on.
Martin Werner, the under-secretary of finance, says that the government might be able to salvage only 30% of Fobaproa loans.
The political class was intrigued by September 14th's three-party agreement to sort out the obscure convolutions of the Fobaproa bank bail-out.
The latter has been much criticised because some of the buyers turned out to be stupendous crooks, for whose thievery Fobaproa also paid.
And under pressure to keep banks afloat, Fobaproa did not have the time, or the inclination, to look into the loans it was buying.
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Some of these were responsible for the banks' bad lending practices, big loans to other newly privatised firms and frauds that all eventually landed on Fobaproa.
It proposed a scheme whereby un-repaid loans above 5m pesos would again become the business of the banks, but Fobaproa would take over more of their small ones.
Instead the banks, including a few that had lent fraudulently to friends or their own directors, simply dumped as many dubious loans as they could on to Fobaproa's books.
Worse, no firm timetable was set for asset disposals, allowing officials to argue for delay until prices rose whereas, thanks in part to the overhang on Fobaproa's books, they have mostly fallen.
PAN's but in fact is more like creative accounting: it would bring forward the day when the banks have to meet the share of the dud debt that they agreed to at the start, when they sold their loans to Fobaproa.
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