Apparently, Nebraska is where you go when you’re running a company and want to prove to the world that everything is okay. First, he put $5 billion into Goldman Sachs, and now Warren Buffett, the Great Value Investor of the Missouri River Valley, is buying $3 billion of perpetual preferred stock in General Electric. Here’s the release GE …

Jay Newton-Small has already explained on Swampland that the bailout legislation to be considered by the Senate today will be piggybacking on some mental health legislation that passed the House. What I didn’t realize until checking on the Library of Congress’s Thomas site just now is that the original title of the bill was the Paul …

Economist Tyler Cowen has just posted a handy list of his views on the crisis. I found myself nodding my head in agreement on just about all of them. Go to his blog for the whole thing, but here are a few of my faves:

1. Glass-Steagall repeal was not a major cause of the financial crisis, nor was government-induced “minority

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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, I’m told

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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 a lot)

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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 don’t …

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, as do the

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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 …

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

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