The Treasury Department is quietly shelving plans to open a $1 billion pilot program to buy back toxic assets from banks. This is the centerpiece of Obama's plan to fix the horrible bank crisis and it has apparently died an ignoble death.Why? Not even banks in serious trouble could stomach the government's terms for this assistance according to this New York Times article by Edmund Andrews:Many banks have refused to sell their loans, in part because doing so would force them to mark down the value of those loans and book big losses. Even though the government was prepared to prop up prices by offering cheap financing to investors, the prices that banks were demanding have remained far higher than the prices that investors were willing to pay.In a statement, the F.D.I.C. acknowledged that it had not been able to get banks interested in its so-called Legacy Loans Program. Scheduled to start later this month, the pilot program was aimed at selling off $1 billion in troubled home...(Read Full Post)