bailout approved

Yes, I'm a skeptic, the ultimate skeptic according to my wife, but it is not shocking how much news came out in the last week or so of businesses suddenly having very public problems securing loans, and polls saying that public opinion was turning with the news.  And of course the bailout gets done on a Friday, just like most of the single bank bailouts over the past months.  Meanwhile, the crux of the bailout is unchanged.

So now the free market knows that Paulson has hundreds of billions to spend, a mandate to spend it, dubious controls and oversight, and accountability and visibility that will be as transparent as the CDOs that helped get us here.  The free market will exploit that like it exploits any known information, only at a trillion-dollar type of magnitude.  Some people and companies will make a killing; I hope some of it circulates back into the market.

I don't even want to think about how creative the accounting will get for any of this, no doubt to be carefully overseen by the groups heavily involved in the buying and selling.  Meanwhile, since the crisis has now been "solved", the failures that got us here will not be under the amount of fire that they should be.

And now I just saw that a Fed-backed Citigroup deal to buy Wachovia assets is potentially in conflict with a Wells Fargo deal to buy Wachovia.  Hmmm, I guess the federal regulators will sort it out. 

Meanwhile, Obama, McCain, Biden and Palin are all unwilling to discuss how the bailout will change their economic plans, yet were all pushing the bailout; maybe the one unanimous position that the four of them share.

Since the bailout has passed, I hope it was the right move.  Certainly seems like there was data somewhere that convinced an awful lot of people that understand the economy much better than I do.  But it sure doesn't sit well right now.  But, hey, it is Friday, we'll forget about it by Monday, right?