friggin' hoo. Let the whole rotten mess crumble. Then wheel out the guillotine. Let the Wall Street aristos go the way of their royal brethren.

No sympathy for robber barons, I say! They certainly spared none for us.

That deadline is a result of Congress' intent to adjourn this week and head home on vacation to do a little electioneering.

I don't find that credible. This crisis has been building for over a year, bogus Testimony from the Bernanke and Paulson not withstanding. It's also being reported that the Bush Admin had versions of this plan kicking around for months.

This stampede trick is exactly how we got the Patriot act and the war in Iraq.

For starters a 3 1/2 page plan to spend up to 700 billion dollars would not fly in any corporate boardroom, so why should it fly with our representatives who are responsible for not wasting taxpayer dollars. Once again the Bush administration is short changing America with their take it or leave it proposals. Congress should take all the time it needs to get this right. Bush has already pulled this urgency act with the Iraq war resolution and the Patriot Act. Three times is twice too much. Let the free market captitalist's stew in their own juices for awhile. All of the Bush regulators should resign en masse for failing to do their jobs. CEO's of firms needing rescuing should also resign. Wall Street has truly failed America and they should be punished for their unethical and in some cases corrupt practices which the FBI is now investigating. Their is now no doubt that we have just gone through eight years of the most incompetent president in the last 100 years. What a sad commentary on how this president, his Wall Street friends, and his neoconservative foreign policy advisors has embarrassed this country on all fronts. We badly need a new FDR to take office on January 20, 2009.

The problem with the bail out plan is not limited to its gross injustice. It is also that it appears to be nothing more than a scheme to pass the losses on to another buyer (the incredibly gullible US taxpayer), delaying and magnifying the inevitable day of reckoning. The most elementary principle of economics is that the only "real price" of anything is the amount that the market is willing to pay. The entire bail out plan is based on the erroneous assumption that the Wall Street geniuses who created, bought and sold the derivatives did not grossly overestimate their value. Taken further, the assumption is that given time, we will learn that these securities have a "real" value in excess of what anyone is willing to pay for them right now. This assumption is based on nothing but pure speculation in the face of ample market evidence to the contrary. If one assumes the more likely truth, that the "real price" of these securities is what the market is willing to pay right now, the bail out scheme is a greater disaster waiting to happen. The source of the problem is the inflated prices of the residential real estate that ultimately backs these derivatives. It appears that this was a classic asset bubble and there is no reason to think that the US real estate market will rebound to bubble prices or that US mortgagees will suddenly be able to make their payments (without just borrowing more money they cannot pay either directly by another round of subprime lending or indirectly by government subsidies). The ultimate danger is not a meltdown of the US banking system, it is the collapse of the credibility of US government bonds and the US's ability to borrow at low rates. If we switch the risk to the US government, and as has been the case for the last 50 years, the US government proves incapable of being fiscally responsible, while Wall Street goes right back to it irresponsible profiteering ways (why not, it worked before and quarterly profits are all that matters), we will be facing a much more severe and irreparable crisis in a few short years. Better to deal with the disaster now by liquidating the problem on the open market no matter how painful. Otherwise, we are just doubling down with the entire wealth of the US on the table, and we may well go bust.

But it will inevitably fail. Once it fails, if we fail to reform it, it'll start on up on its own anyway. It's happened before, and perhaps more crucially, it'll happen again, and like a forest fire, the longer it goes without the fiercer it'll be when it happens.

So... why delay it at exponentially more expensive rates only to have it hit that much harder? Embrace the crash, let it all fall out, pick up and start again. Even if you're a die-hard fiat currency believer, that's the way it's supposed to go.

Even if this plan works, it just makes things worse. Of course, he's hoping to make it worse for different people than it would be bad for now. That's the sleight of hand going on here on some of Congress and Paulson's part, but Bernanke's just a creature of the system... a system, sadly, that he never quite understood was doomed from conception.

"In the long run, we're all dead." It's the long run now. Keynes is long dead. Now his system of mortgaged future, otherwise known as debt, is doing what it was always designed to do. And we're all dead.

This sounds a little like a lemons argument. You are trying to push the price above the "consumers'" expected return so that high quality assets enter the market. So then what? I see the beginnings of a model but it is unclear what happens when you then have high and low quality assets which the buyer (the government?) can't tell apart. I'm skeptical but interested...

If you say Bernanke and Paulson are okay, then okay. But please keep delivering details, and please keep reading our questions.

They are so honest, earnest, non partisan, tireless, integrity filled, and ruggedly individualistic that we should just trust them with the 700 Billion because otherwise the nice firms won't play his game with him. Remember, you are all going to die if you don't give the post partisan wise men exactly what they want!