OK, you've got these loser companies that nobody wants to own stock in, because the stock's worthless because nobody wants to own stock in them.

So it looks like the only way to turn the market around it to do something stupid involving having the government buy up the crap assets, and there is all this "
oh, what can we do" where they are trying to figure out what value to put on the assets, because if the government pays too little the private interests aren't going to invest and if they pay too much, well, they pay too much. Like most dilemmas in the real world, this one is a result of trying to lie. The assets don't have a value because they are crap, not because nobody is smart enough to figure out the value. The value is JACK. The lie is that it is something more.

So here's my solution. The government buys them, but not for cash - for lottery tickets. Let's say you have an asset with a face value (or equivalent pretend value) of a billion, that's maybe worth 10M. The asset is converted to lottery tickets. One lucky holder gets 20M and everybody else gets receipts that can be recycled.

Look into the psychology of lotteries. It works. Granted, it doesn't work with people who are paying attention, but these are people who bought derivatives they didn't understand.