The Bailouts

On the Geithner Plan:

Freakonomics has Diamond, Kashyap, and Rajan on the Geithner Plan. This is the best summary I've seen.

Paul Krugman on Tue on the Geithner plan: The Rorschach plan (wonkish, or at least hard to read). "It’s really not clear what the plan means; there’s an interpretation that makes it not too bad, but it’s not clear if that’s the right interpretation." It all depends on how the stress test is implemented and what happens when a major financial institution fails it.

On Wed Brad DeLong wrote Brief Notes on the Geithner Financial Rescue Plan. "As the Fed takes on tail risk and buys up risky assets, the supply of assets the private sector must hold declines and their prices will rise."

Andrew Sullivan summarizes some others descriptions as Not Sweden.

On the Stimulus Bill:

I'm not sure about what actually passed but as of Tue here's a comparison of the House and Senate versions of the stimulus bill.

Here's an interesting treemap representation of the 1/15 version.

Digby wrote in What Do They Know? about how few economists are on TV news explaining difficult concepts to us about the Stimulus Bill. "If one of the duties of journalism is to educate the public about complicated issues, you would think during a crisis like this they would have a stable of economists rather than political hitmen and village gossips discussing the issue. But, they don't."

digby wrote about the GOP War on Obama in The Light Dawns.

Yesterday the New York Times wrote Bipartisanship Isn't So Easy, Obama Sees. "heir unrequited overtures to Republicans over the past several weeks taught Mr. Obama and his aides some hard lessons. Advisers concluded that they allowed the measure of bipartisanship to be defined as winning Republican votes rather than bringing civility to the debate, distracting attention from what have otherwise been major legislative victories. Although Mr. Obama vowed to keep reaching out to Republicans, advisers now believe the environment will probably not change in coming months. Rather than forging broad consensus with Republicans, the Obama advisers said they would have to narrow their ambitions and look for discrete areas where they might build temporary coalitions based on regional interests rather than party, as on energy legislation. They said they would also turn to Republican governors for support - a tactic that showed promise during the debate over the economic package - even if they found few Republican allies in Washington."

OpenLeft says the GOP plan isn't working: