Not that I’m commenting on the relative merits or not of the nationalisation of institutions, but it is deeply amusing that a far-right leaning Republican administration should be the one responsible for “largest lurch toward socialism that [the] country has ever seen”.

They are right bastards of the first order.

1. It needs to be IN ALL CAPS.

2. There aren’t nearly enough misspellings and grammatical errors.

The unfortunate thing about the bailout is that, by nature of the bailout strategy, the federal government won’t take advantage of either of these means to assess and temper the riskiness of their loans. The point of the bailout is to keep big financial institutions from going bankrupt, so foreclosure is not a real option; and since the loans are to keep failing companies from going bankrupt, the federal government also doesn’t want to give the loans based on companies ability to repay — they want the loans to go to companies that are the least likely to repay (the ones hurt hardest by the financial crisis). So the bailout is based not only on the premise that the liquidity offered to banks via these loans will be enough to take them from failing to profitable, but also that they will actually use the loans for this purpose despite the fact that their recent history shows them inept at turning liquitidy into profit, and the government’s “don’t let them fail” strategy gives them little incentive to make enough money to repay these loans.

If you need help understanding Paulson’s power grab, I’m sure plenty of folks would be happy to explain it to you. Would hate for you to miss out on the comedy.