The draft of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, known among certain Republican leaders as a “crap sandwich,” is out. All 106 pages of it. I just read through it really really quickly, and my main takeaway is that was that it seems to require that Treasury take stock warrants (or senior debt if no equity is available) in …

It will be very interesting to see the actual legislative language of this bailout agreement that negotiators from Congress and the Treasury Department announced that they reached early this morning. Because from what they’ve said so far I still can’t tell if Congress won or Treasury did.

What Treasury initially asked for was $700 …

What is America’s No. 1 export? Debt. And that’s what my column in the new issue of TIME, with the clipout ballot on the cover, is about. It begins:

Japan and Germany make cars. Saudi Arabia pumps oil. China supplies the world with socks and toys and flat-screen TVs. What does the United States produce? Lots of stuff, but in recent years

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Australian money manager John Hempton owned Washington Mutual preferred shares and was thus wiped out when the bank was seized and flipped to JP Morgan Chase last week. But he’s not mad about that. He’s mad about what happened to owners of Wamu bonds. By also wiping out senior debt holders at Wamu, he argues, the government has now …

What did we learn about the candidates’ economic policies tonight?

John McCain is going to cut pork-barrel spending. All $18 billion of it.

Barack Obama has a lot of seven- (or five- or three- or whatever) point plans to make things better for nurses and other regular folks like you and me.

And they’re both going to vote for the …

From Brad DeLong:

Is 2008 Our 1929?

No. It is not. The most important reason it is not is that Bernanke and Paulson are both focused like laser beams on not making the same mistakes as were made in 1929.

They are also focused, but not quite as much, on not making the mistakes made by Arthur Burns in the 1970s.

And they are also

…

I just realized, in reading over my post on the House Republicans’ alternative to the Paulson plan, a.k.a. the TARP, that I kind of buried the lede. I asked Mark Zandi, a big-time expert on the mortgage mess (buy his book here) and a McCain adviser (not one of the guys who rides along in the plane or anything, but still), what he thought …

I’ve been doing a little checking around on Eric Cantor‘s idea to insure everybody’s mortgage, which he and other House Republicans presented Thursday as an alternative to the Hank Paulson’s TARP (for Troubled Asset Retrieval Program) and is now generating some talk, folks in TIME’s Washington bureau tell me, of a blended plan that would …

Remember the first bailout bill? The one Congress called the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008? It drives me batty to hear all these politicians talk about not doing more for Main Street when we already have legislation meant to do just that.

In installment one of Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke Go to Congress, Sen. Bob Casey …

The apparent collapse of negotiations last night over the Paulson bailout led to a lot of fears that we’d witness a financial market massacre this morning. As Paul Krugman put it at 9:34 p.m.:

I don’t even want to think about what tomorrow’s TED spread will look like.

The TED spread–for those of you who haven’t already learned to …

Yeah, I’m sure all those concerns about the stability of the nation’s financial system are overblown. So what if the government seized the country’s largest depository institution after its souring mortgage portfolio triggered write-downs and losses and a lack of confidence that triggered more than $16 billion in deposit outflows in 10 …