Bailout busts?

People tend to get fixated on things like major bank sales and the level of the various stock indices.  These are important, but they are symptoms, not the main show, which is in the credit markets.  Those remain frozen up.

Was I wrong to support the bailout?  Hard to say.  For one thing, it matters whether the alternative was doing nothing, or doing something better; for sure, it was not a very good design, and the bill that actually passed was worse than the one the House voted down.  For another, I was not positive that the bailout would solve things; it's just that it seemed like the best shot.  Since I can't compare the current world with some alternative in which it failed again, I need to think about what my metrics for assessing the decision should be.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2008/10/bailout-busts/4216/