Clever ideas?

Read today that the Administration has decided or is thinking about converting bond positions into equity positions at the financial institutions it has given money to. This will eliminate the debt from the books and, per the article, generate extra assets to the banks.
This is another of those clever bookkeeping ideas that people come up with every so often that make things look better but don't actualy do anything. This benefits the banks because it converts taxpayer debt into equity that may easily lose value. Further, the equity would have to be sold to investors for taxpayers to see any money and if investors were willing to buy the stock, the Government wouldn't have to.
There have been a lot of clever ideas in business that were designed to make things look better when in fact there was no fundamental change. Basically its the same thing as three card monte, the person with the idea is guaranteed some money and everyone else probably loses. Repackage paper, recategorize assets, extend debt periods, all don't add a dollar of revenue or reduce a dollar of cost in any business. In fact, they most likely generate hefty fees for someone and those fees need to come from somewhere.
I used to evaluate proposals and often I was presented with a proposition that alledgedly reduced costs. Many times this was simply recharacterization to make it look like it was going down. Of course if what I'm doing is a single transaction and the costs were shifted to a different transaction, good for me but the costs are still there. This may be very simplistic, but the only way to reduce costs, is to reduce costs.