RESCUE

The Treasury’s plan is not perfect but it will work (and perhaps make the taxpayer $ over the intermediate to longer term) but it’s got to be put to press in 4 to 5 days or we are in for trouble so severe that most of us will have to learn to enjoy car camping.

Don’t understand that institutional funding has all but ceased; don’t even know what institutions are; don’t understand the overnight markets and what it means when these "freeze up"; don’t know how or why we are moving very quickly from a crisis of illiquidity to one of insolvency? Then take our word for it.

If there is delay, then the crisis we know now - that confined to the world’s financial system, will mutate to one that impacts lending by banks to households and non-financial corporations, that is, all the rest of us. If this happens our economy is toast.

Upset with the wording of this deal as some of our friends seem to be? For example, "..decisions by the Secretary ...are non-reviewable....may not be reviewed by any court..." Fine, put in a nod to accountability, make Paulson promise he won’t donate the $700bln to the Nature Conservancy for goodness sake.

Bothered by the ornaments that Congress wants to hang on this deal? Good. So are most reasonable people. But there is nothing on the books prohibiting greed; the trade off between keeping a few of the Street types on salary, or at the very least a severe recession, is not a trade off at all. Our guess is that Congress will finally come to understand the scale and gravity of this situation and retreat.

Every one of us better hope so.

Robert Craven