Paul Krugman says No deal and tells you why.

Echidne refers to it as Crony Capitalism Strikes Back and follows up with More On The Blank Check.

Duncan gets a little shrill:

Any member of Congress who looks at the plan to give Hank unchecked power to transfer $700 billion from the Treasury to his friends’ companies and has any reaction other than “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me” does not deserve to hold office.

Well, they are liberal economists, and they seem to object to providing the “financial professionals” who created this mess with most of a trillion taxpayer dollars to do whatever they want with.  I realize that the Shrubbery thinks its normal, because that’s what happened every time one of his businesses failed, but sometimes you have to pay your own bills.

Update: Brad Delong was first with the title, No Deal!, and extra shrill [note exclamation point].

In addition to things going on in Real Life® I’ve been looking for information on the Super Atomic, Better Than Sliced Bread, Going To Solve All Our Problems Plan. Pretty slim pickings when it comes to details.

Atrios is wondering why the “line in the sand” about no new bailouts resulted in 0 To $1 Trillion In 4 days Flat. What is it that changed? What facts emerged that convinced Bernacki and Paulson that they needed spend upwards of $ 1,000,000,000,000?  Duncan is also concerned that they haven’t figured out that this is not a liquidity problem, but is more involved than that.

Nouriel Roubini, a person who has been saying this was going to happen since 2004 and a specialist in collapsing economies, says that we need to bring back the very effective program created under FDR, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. He says if they don’t deal directly with the mortgages, anything they do will have only short-term effects.

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