THE MAIN THING THE WEEK'S NEGOTIATIONS DID...:

Dr. Paulson's Tough Medicine, In a Pill the Public Can Swallow (Steven Pearlstein, 9/29/08, Washington Post)

The normally sure-footed Paulson stumbled badly last weekend when he rushed to the Capitol with a vague and poorly explained proposal that all but invited politicians and the news media to label it as a "$700 billion bailout for Wall Street" -- a moniker from which it nearly never recovered.

In fact, even in its original form, the Paulson plan would not have cost taxpayers anywhere near $700 billion, nor was Wall Street ever to be the primary beneficiary. The aim all along was to restore the flow of credit to Main Street's homeowners and businesses through banking and credit channels that have become dangerously constricted in recent months, threatening to choke off capital to the entire economy.

By acting as a buyer of last resort and allowing financial institutions to compete to sell some of their depressed mortgage-backed securities, Paulson hoped to jump-start credit markets to the point that prices for the securities would rise to close to their real economic value, private investors would feel confident enough to re-enter the market and banks would have the capital to begin lending again.

Paulson also intended to use some of the money to inject fresh capital into banks and financial institutions whose failure would jeopardize the stability of the financial system, in exchange for government ownership and control, much as the Treasury and Fed had done with Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and insurance giant AIG.

And all along he had made informal promises to congressional leaders that, as the government gained effective control of millions of troubled mortgages, it would use its newfound position to prevent unnecessary foreclosures by renegotiating the loans on more favorable terms.

All three elements -- the auctions, the negotiated recapitalizations and the foreclosure mitigation -- survived the week's negotiations and remain the core of the 106-page bill, along with the mandate to implement the program quickly, to structure it as he sees fit and to alter it as market conditions require.

What was added over the past week was a panoply of procedural safeguards, taxpayer protection and structural reforms to provide an acceptable political context for the use of so much public money and the grant of such extraordinary discretion and power.

...was turn a golden opportunity for the Republican nominee into a party-inflicted bumble. Had the House GOP come out of the Wednesday meeting saying that John McCain had convinced them they needed to be on board it would have enhanced his deserved reputation as a legislative dealmaker and appealed to independents, who love that kind of stuff. Instead they ginned up the base against a bill they were going to have to swallow sooner or later. Not very deftly played.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 29, 2008 7:35 AM