Jello wrote:

But if a stock market's performance is the test of a policy, this one has failed. At best, the passage of the measure did no evident good. At worst, it backfired.

Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron suspects the latter. "The bailout approach will generate uncertainty about what's going to happen," he told me. "It's quite plausible that it has not calmed markets because no one knows what it means."

The "bailout" has simply added the Government to the bottom line, a kind of Nationalization of debt incurred by the wrongdoings of major financial players on Wall Street. The only thing that we don't have here is anyone who is going to jail for it.