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On that topic, here's some required reading.

Paulson's Plan is like bailing the Titanic with a thimble

While $700 billion sounds like big bikkies, it's chicken feed compared to the scale of outstanding private debt in the USA of $41 trillion.

While the rescue might keep what's left of Wall Street solvent, and could provide a boost to Main Street's economy, it will be dwarfed as the Great De-leveraging begins, as American families and corporations, by choice or by bankruptcy, start reducing their debts rather than piling them forever higher.

... even if the rescue package totalled $2 trillion, and even if it were financed entirely by printing money, ... the best it could do would be to boost aggregate demand by 5%. But the collapse in private borrowing could cut aggregate demand by 30%.

So this rescue won't bail out the Ship of Fools, but it will make the American Ship of State even more insolvent than it already is.

America is in trouble.

There are two sides to this catastrophe, and whatever is done about it, one side or the other is bankrupt.