My point really wasn’t to oppose the bailout but that, when they sweetened the bill to get it to pass, they sweetened it Right and not Left.

And anyway, I still think giving Henry Paulson power over that big hunk of money with no strings and no oversight was plain stupid. Bush appointees have not distinguished themselves for competence.

I’m no economist, but everything I’ve read suggests that that’s not an either/or decision. This may have started as a mortgage crisis, but it’s now a banking crisis, and if the banking system collapses, we will all be well and truly fucked.

Now it may be that talk of a banking collapse is over-excited doom-mongering, but: several banks have already either failed or had to be saved by governments. And despite the fact that the US bailout plan passed, plus the US treasury is putting money into the commercial short-term loan market, and the US treasury and the bank of England loosened up lending terms, and the UK government promised about a trillion dollars to prop up the British banking sector, and several other European governments guaranteeing all the deposits in their countries’ banks, and the Fed and the European Central Bank and the Bank of England and several other central banks all passed a simultaneous cut in interest rates � despite all that � the banks are still apparently very reluctant to lend money to each other.

So while helping with people’s mortgages may be a desirable thing to do in its own right, and would presumably help keep the economy ticking over, it wouldn’t address the problem which the bailout was at least trying to alleviate: i.e. trying to prevent the failure not of one or two banks, but dozens of them. Better if possible to prevent another Great Depression than wait for it to happen and then alleviate the results.