Where is it written that the Fed is a systemic regulator of financial markets? Since much of this involves global financial markets, can we assume there are others?

Bernanke has at times appeared reluctant to expand the Feds power. Under Bush he functioned more as Undersecretary of the Treasury, which is arguably the most important position in government at the moment. When AIG creates a CDS with a foreign bank should we assume two regulators are watching the transaction, one, or none? If there were two, then we could assume there might occasionally be differences of opinion.

Geithner's problem becomes, how will the regulators at the other end respond, if he puts new restrictions in place. Assume for a moment that these derivatives were occasionally offered to firms like AIG, and would not meet our new tougher standards? Would that throw a chill on transfer of payments, letters of credit and other mundane financial paper?

First we must question the assumption that toxic assets all originated domestically. Certainly the MBS problem did, but the second and third iterations, were often offshore players trying to cover the first level of risk.

Is this a plan to force them to eat their peck of dirt, along with the rest of us? Sorry you bought all that toxic mortgage debt, but don't try to lay it off on us.

Then the slaughter of the dollar, which brings us to that bugaboo protectionism, which we are officially against, just as we are against the weak dollar, a system which disallows global financial remainders. Here take these worthless dollars.

This is the conundrum if Geithner decided to lock up the hen house.

like most corporate products the credit default swap is engineered like a sausage, one can surmise its the packaging and the salesmanship that move the product. making that assumption what are we paying for, people to fix these things, or people to sell other people on their contents? which means we are overpaying. these things cannot be unwound or we have done that, so we just need some new packaging, new sales pitch, and for that we pay have to pay financial engineering fees? i think we could wrap this business up with some out of work big three car salesmen.

We're really screwed for a lot of reason, and one of them you allude to is the President forgetting his own managerial style. When Paulson's bazooka went off it seems like everyone, especially Democrats, lost their wits. If I didn't know better I would call it a Republican plan to poison the ground under the new administration, and it has worked like a charm. Now listen to the shrill Congressional Republican voices who rubber stamped President Bush's dishonest and corrupt budgetary excesses, now screaming fiscal responsibility at the Democrats.

Its really laughable, but they may very well make Obama a one term President, and that might not help us gain the continuity we need.

You have to appreciate the challenge. These are guys who don't listen very well. You might think that the road to success is dominated by those who see all the possibilities. Truth is single-mindedness is the one common trait these guys all share. Patti has to get them to forget everything they know. The men seem to focus on one women, while the women tend to consider several men.

This isn't about life changing experiences, its about shaking their preconceptions just long enough that these men can establish a relationship, which hopefully they will nurture, but money has a way of comforting a fair amount of loneliness and disappointment.

Its brutal, and not very satisfying, but hey, the rich need love too.

Expert economists have no choice but to agree with anything the Fed does. This is Iraq War III, there is no room for dissent, we are going in.

That much has not changed. Militarism creates habits which are hard to break. The experts cannot agree that the Iraq war was wrong, or that it was corruptly managed for the benefit of a few. This war is a war between the global players in a global economy. Running that war we have the same Fed chief, and many who are already players in the first economic crisis.

If history repeats itself there will be a false moment of pride, the President will stand behind a banner, Mission Accomplished, and the band will play. Despite some bad news the media will give us the good news, somebody got a job. The stock market will stage a rally, which only retraces part of the first round of losses, before it begins its downward slide again.

Some experts compare this economic downturn to a guerrilla war against America's corporations. Small businesses and individuals who compete to the detriment of these corporations, will be punished by policy and tax decisions. America will grow more fractious, while the President works to keep us all together, with government jobs, government stimulus packages that trickle down from the Federal to the State and County and City level. The corporate supply lines will continue to crumble, making it impossible to service this government network, while preventing workable local solutions to the problem.

The experts cannot accept the truth, so we must fight a bloody and useless war that will literally bankrupt the country. Government benefits far more from the corporate supply system, than the taxpayers, who benefit primarily from what government does for them.

This crisis has been handled like the Iraq war, in a thoughtless rush to judgment in which the American people were never given the facts, and their Congressional representatives never questioned the facts.