http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aFzDKV89fQ0g&refer=home
All good parents know that when their child messes up
The only way they learn is to take responsibility for their actions
You don't bail them out!
Or they never learn
The $700 billion rescue that the U.S. House considers today reflects the unintended consequences of decisions made by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke since March.
Beginning with the orchestrated purchase of Bear Stearns Cos. by JPMorgan Chase & Co., each step was a bold effort to forestall a collapse of the financial system. The economy grew in the first two quarters of this year, and financial distress eased for a while after the Bear Stearns rescue. Still, each decision to bail out or not created more instability, leading to further runs on securities firms, banks and insurers.
``Every time you tinker with this delicate system even small changes can create big ripples,'' said Dino Kos, former head of the New York Fed's open-market operations and now a managing director at Portales Partners LLC in New York. ``This is the impossible situation they are in. The risks are that the government's $700 billion purchase of assets disturbs markets even more.''
Paulson and Bernanke insist that the program to buy troubled mortgages and other securities is needed to revive lending and restore stability to markets. What they haven't discussed is the risk that they inadvertently make matters worse. By creating a government pool of distressed real-estate and bad debt, they could depress the housing market further. Risk may become even more concentrated through a wave of bank mergers that, if unsuccessful, would stick taxpayers with an even higher bill.
Conference Call
The decision to launch the biggest bailout in history came on a Sept. 17 conference call, when Bernanke and Paulson pulled the trigger on a
