And these stock people are STILL trying to get the credit market back to where it was. Yo! Where it was was the problem. Too much borrowing against too little assets. Read Paul Craig Roberts:
The greatest mistake was made in 2004, the year that Reagan died. That year the current Secretary of the Treasury, Henry M. Paulson Jr, was head of the investment bank Goldman Sachs. In the spring of 2004, the investment banks, led by Paulson, met with the Securities and Exchange Commission. At this meeting with the New Deal regulatory agency tasked with regulating the US financial system, Paulson convinced the SEC Commissioners to exempt the investment banks from maintaining reserves to cover losses on investments. The exemption granted by the SEC allowed the investment banks to leverage financial instruments beyond any bounds of prudence.
In place of time-proven standards of prudence, computer models engineered by hot shots determined acceptable risk. As one result Bear Stearns, for example, pushed its leverage ratio to 33 to 1. For every one dollar in equity, the investment bank had $33 of debt!
So it is possible..possible that if there are say $100 billion in "assets" at risk, that these banks may be in for 33 times that or $3 trillion is bad debt. I'm pulling the asset number out of thin air, kinda like the fed guy did for the $700 billion. But you can see that this could get very expensive very fast and anyone suggesting that credit ought to return to the "way it was" is nuts.
