Originally Posted by Villages Kahuna

There are minor and major perpetrators to the apparent failure of the bank bailout plan. The minor perpetrators are the members of Congress who voted a huge amount of money and didn't provide the Treasury Department with even the vaguest directions on how it should be used. To be fair, the "bailout legislation" was heavily negotiated and pushed thru Congress in a big hurry--less than a week, as I recall. Some members of Congress spent more time crafting earmarks and tagging them on the bill as opposed to spending any time thinking about how the bill could have been made better for the taxpayers.

But the major perpetrators are the Treasury Secretary and to a lesser extent his boss, the President, who simply gave the money to a bunch of banks and insurance companies without attaching some conditions to the investments, which was well within their authority. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that the investments might have been conditioned with limitations on executive compensation, non-core business investments or acquisitions, or shareholder dividends, as examples. It doesn't take decades of experience in the financial industry to come up with these ideas, so being inexperienced with the unprecedented situation is no excuse. Competence within the Executive branch appears to be even a greater cause of the misuse of public funds than the inadequacies of the legislation passed by the Congress. The trio of George Bush, Henry Paulson and Neal Kashkiri are beginning to look like Larry, Moe and Curly--except they're wasting amounts of public funds that few of us can even imagine.

And like I said, some Congressmen spent more time crafting earmarks to benefit lobbyists for the likes of wood arrow manufacturers in Alaska than actually thinking about how the bailout bill might have been improved.