where will it stop?

(Oh, and while we're at it: let's find out where the money Bush got "off the books" for the war in Iraq went, mmmkay?)

"transparency" may not mean to the Obama transparency what it means to most of us).

Ah, 2PM NPR hourly news summary mentioned that the great majority of losses will be borne by the taxpayers. That may wake some people up...but Obama fan club? Probably not.

Oh, right.

For some reason, economists believe that national banks should be politically independent, but I've never seen this as anything but corrosive to democracy.

--during those weekend meetings about the TARP legislation, etc.??

The WaPo article on Sunday explaining the new Obama-Geithner-(Paulson) Plan notes in Paragraph 11 (toward bottom of Page One on web):

Last fall, billionaire investor Warren E. Buffet, Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein and William H. Gross, the managing director of PIMCO, the largest bond fund in the world, approached Treasury officials about an idea to create investment funds, using public and private money, to buy toxic assets from banks, according to former senior Treasury officials.

Waldmann highlights Buffet's name, Elana Schor at TPM highlights Gross's name*. I would say don't ignore Goldman Sachs's Lloyd Blankfein--and that they "approached" Treasury officials with the PPIP idea.

Robert Waldmann thinks he was naive not to have seen this earlier:

I wonder if I can explain the Fatal Attraction of the Geithner plan, it seemed dead but it came back.

One strange thing about Geithner is that he humiliating himself by saying he had a plan, then presenting nothing at the big roll out press conference. To me this made sense only if someone had decided the plan was so bad that it was better for him to be humiliated at a press conference than implement it. That means real bad. Then it came back. Plans usually come out on schedule. However, deals often fall through at the last minute. I now have this image of Geithner and Buffet furiously arguing about just how generous a put Buffet would get in exchange for buying and holding sludge and just how restricted participation in the plan would be.

The official line is that the Obama administration decided to involve private investors and then began looking for private investors to involve. Yeah right. I now think that the plan was late because negotiations take time.

*Gross was all over the MCM last night, praising the loan-to-profit plan to the skies. Someone at Goldman Sachs was earlier quoted as saying they were just waiting for the right "incentive" to dive into the Big $hit Pile. Commenters at the TPM post get into the tall weeds of PIMCO's financial moves at the time....

Again, the question: Why are two such disparate administrations with different people coming up with the same solution? Oh, yeah--Who's their Daddy?

positions and counter-positions. Good aggregation in Room for Debate.

Krugman also responds to Summers responding to him.