They must evidence why the bail-out is not give-away.

Sir Martin Wolf in “Congress decides it is worth risking another depression” October 1, with respect to the failure of Congress to approve the bail-out plan writes that “It is understandable because the use of taxpayers money to buy so-called “toxic” mortgage-backed securities from the greedy fools who created the crisis is hard to tolerate”. With it, unwillingly, he helps to reinforce the belief that there will be a considerable give away of tax payers money to the monsters. Of course if Martin Wolf really believes that to be true, then he should of course object to the plan, no matter what.

The objective of the plan is to try to establish a market price for instruments no one knows what they might be worth; and its biggest problem is that it was never sufficiently explicit on how they intended to go about so as to avoid giving away tax payers money. If the plan from the very beginning had been limited to the use of reverse auctions, to acquire a certain low percentage of many different tranches in many different issues, we might not have fallen into the current quagmire.

By the way there was of course much greed greasing the road to crisis, but the qualification of “fools” needs to be reserved exclusively for the regulators who thought they could appoint the credit rating agencies as their sentries and then calmly go to sleep.