The Big Beer Bailout

For Immediate Release:

Statement by Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson, Jr., following Congress’s passage of today’s rescue package:

“As we all know, lax brewing practices earlier this decade led to irresponsible brewing and irresponsible drinking. This simply put too many families into beers they could not finish. We are seeing the impact on drinkers and neighborhoods, with 5 million drinkers now behind on their drinking. Some are just walking away from beers they should never have been drinking in the first place. What began as a sub-prime drinking problem has spread to other, less-risky drinkers, and contributed to excess inventories.

These troubled beers are now parked, or frozen, on the shelves of bars, brewpubs, and other drinking institutions, preventing them from serving drinkable beers. The inability to determine the worth of these beers has fostered uncertainty about beers in general, and even about the cultural condition of the institutions that own them. The normal buying and selling of nearly all types of beers has become challenged.

The role of the ratings agencies cannot be overlooked in the creation of this crisis. The Pulitzer, beerer and the National beer Foundation continued to award these beers their top ratings, even as empties piled up all over America.

These undrinkable beers are clogging up our beer drinking system, and undermining the strength of our otherwise sound beer drinking institutions. As a result, Americans’ personal refrigerators are threatened, and the ability of drinkers to store, and of refrigerators to dispense, has been disrupted.

To restore confidence in our beer markets and our beer drinking institutions, we must address the underlying problem – the loss of confidence in our nation’s brewers. That collapse in confidence is choking off the flow of ideas that is so vitally important to our beers. When the beer drinking system works as it should, ideas flow to brewers and home brewers who brew beers, ensuring an uninterrupted flow of beers to households and businesses. But stresses in our leading breweries have led to the current severe and systemic brewers’ block that threatens to undermine access to beers for working Americans.

This bill contains a broad set of tools that can be deployed to strengthen brewers, large and small, that serve businesses and families. Our brewers are varied – from large breweries headquartered in Milwaukee, to regional breweries that serve multi-state areas, to community home brewers that are vital to the lives of our citizens and their towns and communities. The challenges our brewers face are just as varied – from full-scale brewers’ block, to restructuring failed beers, to simply facing a crisis of confidence.

We must implement these new programs with a strategy that allows us to adapt to changing circumstances, and attract the private inspiration which has always made our cultural system so resilient and innovative.

In these difficult times, leadership – and sacrifice – must start at the top. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and I are agreed it is imperative we take the bad beers out of the system, and slowly work our way through these toxic assets. Yes, it will be painful; it will be difficult; but at times like this, the Government must step in and perform its duty, as drinker of last resort.”

Thanks to Julian Gough’s satire [via BoingBoing] for inspiration.