An excellent overview of what the Treasury Department and others did this week including allowing Lehman to fail, saving AIG, banning short sales, insuring money market funds and planning for a new RTC… and what questions remain.
It is a weird tribute to the scale of this crisis that Mr. Paulson felt he had no choice but to rush this proposal out, because as the day progressed it became increasingly clear that the Treasury Department didn’t yet know how this mechanism was going to work. It is an idea of a plan more than an actual plan. In football, they would call it a Hail Mary pass. Sometimes, of course, a Hail Mary pass is completed for a touchdown. But most of the time they fail.
