Barry Silbert of SecondMarket.
Planet Money contributor Chana Jaffe-Walt is visiting from Seattle this week. She sends this dispatch from her reporting:
Despite looking like a 17-year-old valedictorian, Barry Silbert, 32, has been working hard on a new company that he hopes will be the place to buy and trade toxic assets. He wants his company, SecondMarket to be sort of a consignment store for CDOs and mortgage backed securities. A place where sellers can unload their junk and buyers can bid for it.
Silbert was hoping the government would be one of those buyers, but yesterday, he learned that the Toxic Asset Relief Plan will no longer be relieving assets. Now he has an enormous downtown Manhattan office, a growing staff and complex new software for trading toxic assets. Lots of banks and financial institutions still really want to get rid of this junk. The question is how low they'll go and if anyone out there will be willing to buy it.
Which sort of leaves us back where we started, doesn't it?
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