Wall Street Journal on the bail out so far

Recommended piece by Holman Jenkins on The Bailout So Far that takes a look at what he feels should have been done, and what still could be done:

Here's a fact to mull over: Washington a few months ago might have bought the entire stock of subprime mortgages for about half the money committed by the Fed and Treasury last week to prop up Citigroup and spur consumer and mortgage lending.

True, had it done so, it might have irritated taxpayers and moral-hazard philosophers, since it would have meant relieving bank shareholders of their mistakes. But buying up bad mortgages would at least have left the private sector in charge of issuing new credit, which -- however bad its performance during the housing bubble -- would likely produce better results than government directing credit allocation in the economy.

Sadly, that's where we are today. Bless them for trying, but our firemen have done an objectively crummy job. They failed to douse the confidence/systemic-risk fire and now have moved on to fighting recession by turning credit allocation into a public utility. Vikram Pandit of Citigroup says: "We have gone from arm's length, free market, just-in-time availability" of funding to a system where big credit-reliant businesses now have only one place to turn, government.

There's more at the link.