My attempt to answer a reader’s long list of questions about the bailout has been condensed into an article in the new TIME (with the soup line on the cover). Barbara also has a piece in the magazine about current consumer credit conditions, which is also condensed from something that ran first online. Meanwhile, the [...]

On the topic of the how, even with the bailout bill (sorry, the rescue package), all of our problems won’t be solved overnight, I offer a story I wrote for Time.com today. It starts: To understand how the credit crunch is hitting American business — and, in turn, you — look no further than The [...]

So this time it passed, and it wasn’t even all that close (263-171). After turning down a $700 billion financial bailout plan on Monday, the House turned around and this afternoon approved an even more expensive one–loaded with tax cuts, an expansion of federal deposit insurance, and a now infamous tax exemption for certain toy [...]

So now federal regulators are in a bit of a bind. If they let Wells Fargo ride in and snatch Wachovia out from under Citigroup, they get a better deal for taxpayers—an industry-on-industry solution with no government backstop. But that might send a dangerous signal to the market. Setting aside the issue of whether or [...]

The House is expecting to vote on the big bailout (oh, sorry, rescue) bill around 12:30. Jay Newton-Small has a story up on TIME.com explaining that the fiscal-conservative Blue Dog Democrats in the House, who mostly supported the bill on its first go round but are ticked off at all the junk the Senate added [...]

Can we stop saying now that financial troubles “might” tip us into a recession? As this morning’s employment numbers (and a lot of other data in recent days) make clear, we’re in a recession. I’m still betting that the arbiters of such things will eventually decide we’ve been in a weird, mild recessiony kind of [...]