One of the few reasons that the Washington Post should still be in business: Previous editions indicated and linked here.

Almost a week ago—a few decades of Internet time, when people could still believe House Republicans might be sane—Brad DeLong quoted the summary: To provide authority for the Federal Government to purchase certain types of troubled assets for the purposes of providing stability to and preventing disruption in the economy and financial system and protecting […]

Dr. Black’s detection of Sadly No’s logical fallacy appears to have been addressed: PALIN: I feel so alive! Let’s grab my gay friend and go shoot wolves from the safety of a helicopter.

Driving fatalities significantly increase around Election Day.

Unemployed persons (seasonally adjusted) appears to be approaching 10,000,000. The other interesting thing about the table is that December 2007 now looks as if it was much worse than was reported at the time: another piece of data that might indicate that we have been in a recession since Q4 2007.

…even though we certainly need some bailing out. Brad Setser notes the obvious: Frankly the TARP is now starting to look small relative to the Fed’s balance sheet. while including the reality: The latest [H.4.1] data release should settle the question; absent enormous liquidity support from the Fed, a much broader set of financial institutions […]

Mortgages are a bitch: [I]n addition to the $300k that we already knew was still outstanding on their mortgage…they had another mortgage on this place. And so the reason they’ve been inexplicably stalling and quibbling over how much they’ll pay to do the repairs that are doubtless going to be required by the VA assessor […]

Via Dr. Black, from Google Finance, the charitable interpretation of what was done this afternoon is the old Wall Street adage above (click on image to see it well):

by Ken Houghton Prefatory Note: I wrote this several hours ago, but we had enough great posts this morning from Robert, Spencer, cactus, and rdan that I scheduled it instead of posting directly. In the interim, the House approved the second bailout bill, which I am already on record as opposing, for reasons similar to […]

by Ken Houghton Paul Krugman presents the optimistic version*: The House will probably vote on Friday on the latest version of the $700 billion bailout plan — originally the Paulson plan, then the Paulson-Dodd-Frank plan, and now, I guess, the Paulson-Dodd-Frank-Pork plan (it’s been larded up since the House rejected it on Monday). I hope […]