Mebbe and mebbe not.

Bear in mind that this "$700 billion dollar bailout" is neither. In large part it involves loans, not expenditure of money for bad paper.

So it isn't so much a bailout as an intermediary cushion or shock absorber.

Or so I understand. The critical issue is whether oversight and constitutional limitations should apply, versus a kindo f czar-like power to the Treasury to take up troubled assets.

The other big question mark is the picture of collapse being offered as the immediate consequence of not approving this course of action.
Individual firms going down because they mismanaged is a natural consequence of ineptitude and bad luck and shouldn't be rewarded.

At the same time, an unknown range of interdependencies exist which could go down in a cascading effect with far-reaching secondary consequences. I don't know how wide and deep those consequences could be.

A