Obama and the Band

Obama and his band are great salesmen, and if they don't start putting some meat into this current stimulus campaign, they'll soon look like great used car salesmen. Apparently, the $350 billion is still safely in the system; banks are simply too timid to lend it, and over $850 billion of reserves sit in the Fed's vault. Goldman Sachs wants to give their TARP money back in light of the executive pay contingency. So it's there.

Hopefully we'll see some details of this $2.5 trillion deus ex machina soon. I doubt the greed will be controlled by new regulations soon enough; the US government could very well become our new First National Bank -- for good. (A cartoon in last week's New Yorker called it First Nationalized Bank.) That may be the future: we look back at the 1990s and the 2000s as an era when men and women in suits legally stole from men and women in jeans.