{"id":1296,"date":"2008-09-20T23:00:30","date_gmt":"2008-09-21T03:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/?p=1296"},"modified":"2008-09-20T23:00:30","modified_gmt":"2008-09-21T03:00:30","slug":"the-bailout-mindboggling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/2008\/09\/20\/the-bailout-mindboggling\/","title":{"rendered":"The Bailout: Mindboggling"},"content":{"rendered":"

And I’m not talking about the numbers (those are merely incomprehensible<\/em>).\u00c2\u00a0 I’m talking about the fact that Congress seems poised to – yet again – hand the Bush administration carte blanche to deal with a critical threat, with no apparent thought to the impact.\u00c2\u00a0 NPR’s Planet Money blog notes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I would guess that this has to be one of the biggest peacetime transfers of power from Congress to the Administration in history.<\/p>\n

[ . . . ]<\/p>\n

The Treasury Secretary can buy broadly defined assets, on any terms he wants, he can hire anyone he wants to do it and can appoint private sector companies as financial deputies of the US government. And he can write whatever regulation he thinks are needed.<\/p>\n

[ . . . ]<\/p>\n

This graph really stands out:<\/p>\n

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Whoa.<\/p>\n

So, for the next three months, and then an additional six months after that, the Treasury Secretary can do anything he deems appropriate without anybody anywhere looking it over.<\/p>\n

That seems like an awful lot of absolute power.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And that doesn’t even get to the merits of the matter.\u00c2\u00a0 For that, we have Paul Krugman, who sums it up as: no deal<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 (I also recommend following Calculated Risk<\/a> on this subject.)\u00c2\u00a0 This is happening quickly, and perhaps the radio reports of Congressional willingness to move forward with this bill in this form were optimistic.\u00c2\u00a0 I have to hope so.\u00c2\u00a0 We all do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

And I’m not talking about the numbers (those are merely incomprehensible).\u00c2\u00a0 I’m talking about the fact that Congress seems poised to – yet again – hand the Bush administration carte blanche to deal with a critical threat, with no apparent thought to the impact.\u00c2\u00a0 NPR’s Planet Money blog notes: I would guess that this has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-law","category-policy"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1296\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}