I've been reading Neal Stephenson's Baroque Trilogy as this whole mess unwinds. I feel like he's given me a better understanding of what's going on than most reporters, academics or columnists have.

We're damned if we do and damned if we don't. Luckily for Paulson, he cashed out all of this GS stock when it was near its historical high. I'm sure that will help a lot of Americans sleep easier tonight. It warms my belly alright.

I don't know about anyone else.. but I'm not buying anything that I'm not putting in my mouth. Antiperspirant notwithstanding.

"I will never apologize for changing a strategy or an approach if the facts change."

What changed? Not a blessed thing. Except Mr. Paulson's understanding that giving the taxpayers ABSOLUTELY nothing (except toxic trash) in exchange for our billions simply wouldn't fly in Congress. So he did the next best thing. We get nonvoting stock that pays substandard dividends and with no premium for buy back. And no committment to reign in CEO salaries and bonuses...... I think Mr. Leonard gives Secretary Goldman-Sachs far too much benefit of the doubt.

One of GM's problems is getting approvals for loans for people who have perfectly good credit. Freeing up that market will help float the car companies without direct investment.

"There is a case to be made that this endless string of ad hoc maneuvers expose Paulson and the Bush administration as bumblers who have no idea what they're doing."

I think that IS the case they want everyone to be making as they shovel public money (rather borrowed money the public is on the hook for) out the door and into the chests of their financial industry friends.

And as to 'lowering costs and increasing credit availability to consumers'- in a debt-based economy predicated on perpetual growth, it stands to reason that if growth is to be maintained, so too must the growth of debt be maintained. Borrow and spend, borrow and spend, until ultimately 'the banks' own everything.

His life in finance has made him oblivious to the needs of Main Street and the real economy. He simply cannot see that there needs to be a solution independent of Wall Street. We need jobs we can live on, and the credit mess will take care of itself.

If the middle class has the means to buy again- based on real income not mining equity in a real estate bubble-- we will buy cars, banks will have reason to lend and businesses to borrow again.

But Paulson, with his focus on finance, can't see that the source of this crisis, and the foundation of its solution, lies in the real economy, not on Wall Street.

The foundation is in the real economy. The source was an imbalance in the real economy, between productivity increases and stagnant wages. Stagnant wages and booming productivity, along with the Reagan tax policies that favored the wealthy, created a huge pool of capital desperately looking for productive investments. This motivated all the unstable financial innovations that we are now paying so dearly for. (It also created conditions in which people HAD to mine the equity in their homes.)

And interestingly enough, this was exactly the process that took place in the 1920s. And we know how THAT one ended up.

Today, everything has changed, except our ways of thinking, and hence we hurdle headlong towards catastrophe.

Citigroup just informed that they are raising my APR on my MasterCard to 19.99% from 16.99%, not because of anything I did, just "Because." I assume this is them passing on the cost of their bad investments to me.

In the 1970s and 80s Citicorp passed on their bad investments to their customers in the form of higher fees for checks, bounced checks and transcation fees.

If I am already paying for their bad decisions why should I pay again? They got relief through the new bankruptcy law. Did they stop sending me enticements for new cards? Did they stop trying to hook up every college student in the nation? Or every person who just came out of bankruptcy?

I pay for my mistakes but I am tired of paying for every company's mistakes.

energy efficiency improvements (new furnace, water heater, fridge, solar heat, pv, etc) transportation improvements (scrap low mpg and buy 40+ mpg car), life disasters (medical, etc), school are what I consider worthwhile debts for reducing cost of capital. beyond that, consumer credit should stay tight.

How much better off are we now after the tax rebate checks were sent out this spring? Our economy is really humming now, now that we have all those Chinese made LCD TVs all over our homes! Yeah BABY!

China has already announced major increases in infrastructure spending to help pull them out of the financial crisis. FDRs New Deal, a large amount of which went into infrastructure, is widely credited with bringing the US out of the Great Depression (of course, WWII sped that up).

The problem with the bailouts is it's only throwing good money after bad -- it's propping up toxic assets. If we were to start laying down high speed train tracks, ramp up manufacturing of windmills and of solar energy systems, in the end, the US will be better off and will have put people to work -- propping up the economy and yielding a real return.

The downside of infrastructure investment is simple though, it can't be ramped up as is needed now. Engineering, designing and obtaining right of ways and litigation all come first.

I've got an idea though. Everyone's been moving to exurbia while allowing cities to die -- let's declare eminent domain, take a bulldozer to the worst, blighted neighborhoods, and make our cities new again. The displaced can move out to the empty McMansions in mortgage default.

We can make these areas energy efficient, rid them of drugs and crime, and ramp up the other infrastructure improvements while rebuilding the cities.

Student Loans are generally considered an investment that pay great dividends in the form of opportunity later in life.

I can't say that credit card debt and car financing are going toward investments.