Reports Jay Newton-Small. She continues: I’m told the bill will likely pass the Senate even though it will have to garner 60 votes, which means the hurdle remains the House. I’m still waiting to hear if the ‘Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008,’ is identical to the bill the House failed to pass Monday. But, [...]

The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Accounting Standards Board declared Tuesday that in some situations you sorta don’t have to mark the value of the securities you hold to their market values if you really don’t feel like it, while many Republicans in Washington are pushing for an even more sweeping suspension of [...]

Lifted from the comments to my post on the media’s failure to explain what’s at stake here, a most excellent explanation of the credit crisis by Sean DeCoursey forgot his password (hey, that’s what he calls himself; I’m not gonna risk insulting him by just calling him Sean DeCoursey): The simplest (and this is simplifying [...]

I just got around to reading Glenn Greenwald’s much-discussed post from Monday about how the Bailout follows the 10 normal principles for how our government functions. I agree with a couple of his points (that the concessions Treasury made to Congressional leaders in drafting the bill were mostly a joke; that a lot of economists [...]

Okay, so journalists (and Treasury and the Fed officials) have been unhelpfully vague in trying to describe the bad things that could happen if we don’t do something dramatic to pump money into the financial system. LSE economist and FT blogger Willem Buiter is not so vague: The US stock market tanks. Bank shares collapse, [...]

Justin responds to our colleague Jim Poniewozik’s rumination that maybe the media is to blame for the bailout bill’s failure. The argument: the mainstream business press dropped the ball on clearly articulating what awful things would happen to ordinary Americans if Congress didn’t pass a rescue package. Like I said, Justin takes that notion head [...]

First, Jim Poniewozik. Now, Jimmy Pethokoukis, with a couple of presumably well-plugged-in thoughts on what might happen next on Capitol Hill: 1) The Democrats could push through the bailout with more Democratic votes by adding in a stimulus package or a provision that would allow bankruptcy judges to unilaterally change mortgage contracts. With the markets [...]

Jim Poniewozik wonders if continued opposition to the bailout plan stems in part from the media’s failure to explain the potential consequences: [W]hat we’ve generally seen are either dire—but very vague—warnings, or the general argument that, if credit dries up, that affects loans to businesses and little guys, and people start to lose jobs. That’s [...]

Yes, we had a 777-point drop in the Dow industrials yesterday, but, as our colleague Jyoti Thottam reports, Asian markets trembled but for the most part held up today. She writes: Japan’s Nikkei Index fell 4.1% on Sept. 30; after declining in early trading, stocks in China and Hong Kong eked out small gains. “The [...]