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

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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 reaction was not as bad

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Welcome to all of you coming from the link in TIME magazine. This was my original response to a reader’s questions. It was condensed and edited for the magazine, but I’ve left it untouched here.

I got an e-mail from a reader late last week with a bunch of very good questions about the bailout bill. I hadn’t quite finished answering them …

I wrote an article this afternoon for TIME.com. It begins:

By voting down the proposed $700 billion financial bailout package — and causing a spectacular stock market rout — a majority of members in the House of Representatives made a clear statement that they didn’t want to put taxpayers on the hook for the failures of financial

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The most popular story on reuters.com right now–ahead of Lawmakers reject bailout plan–is Heather Locklear arrested in California. That’s probably just because the Locklear story has been on the site a few hours longer, but I nonetheless find it strangely encouraging.

The title of the most recent research from Rasmussen Reports wasn’t quite as funny this morning before our elected representatives went to work: “Opposition to Bailout Plan Falls Dramatically.” Just a mere half-day ago the polling outfit reported:

As Congress prepares to vote on a proposed economic rescue plan, opposition to the measure

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So that was interesting. They kept the vote open for a while after time expired, but now it looks like the bailout bill is dead. Maybe they’ll try to resurrect it later this week, but I don’t really see how.

What happens now? Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the FDIC can keep merging and closing and bailing out as they’ve done up to …

We’ve heard an awful lot in the last few days about how making legislation is like making sausage. Having been involved in some actual sausage-making over the summer, I figured I ought to share this photo (that’s Curious Capitalist Jr. on the left and Mrs. CC on the right):

I just turned on CSPAN to see Illinois Democrat Bill Foster (who won a special election in March to replace retiring former House Speaker Denny Hastert) defending the bailout legislation. I didn’t catch much of what he said, just that he liked the way the AIG deal was structured (with taxpayers getting up to 80% of any upside), and that …

Why are markets so down in the dumps this morning? Congress came to apparent agreement over the weekend on a $700 billion financial bailout plan, after all. Shouldn’t everybody be happy now?

Well, insta-analysis of market movements is always dangerous, but it does seems pretty relevant to note that negotiations on Capitol Hill aren’t …

Small businesses, apparently. I happened to be reading a summary of the National Small Business Association’s Mid-Year Economic report and came across this:

Included in the report, 68 percent of small-business owners report that FDIC insurance is not adequate enough to insure their business accounts, and nearly two-thirds have already

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The key detail from this morning’s announcement that Citigroup is buying the bulk of Wachovia, with the FDIC’s help:

The FDIC has entered into a loss sharing arrangement on a pre-identified pool of loans. Under the agreement, Citigroup Inc. will absorb up to $42 billion of losses on a $312 billion pool of loans. The FDIC will absorb

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