How Bad Was It?

Seriously, how bad was the financial situation yesterday about noon or so when the Fed let it slip that UberBailout(tm) was coming and it goosed the markets by 400?

You notice that not a single Beltway type is saying "This is a bad idea." How bad is the situation that the most fractured and partisan Congress in the history of the country is united in an election year?

How bad, indeed? This bad.

It was a room full of people who rarely hold their tongues. But as the Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, laid out the potentially devastating ramifications of the financial crisis before congressional leaders on Thursday night, there was a stunned silence at first.

Mr. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. had made an urgent and unusual evening visit to Capitol Hill, and they were gathered around a conference table in the offices of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

“When you listened to him describe it you gulped," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York.

As Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and chairman of the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, put it Friday morning on the ABC program “Good Morning America,” the congressional leaders were told “that we’re literally maybe days away from a complete meltdown of our financial system, with all the implications here at home and globally.”

Mr. Schumer added, “History was sort of hanging over it, like this was a moment.”

When Mr. Schumer described the meeting as “somber,” Mr. Dodd cut in. “Somber doesn’t begin to justify the words,” he said. “We have never heard language like this.”

“What you heard last evening,” he added, “is one of those rare moments, certainly rare in my experience here, is Democrats and Republicans deciding we need to work together quickly.”

Scared shitless. Scared to the point where they unanimously have decided it is a good idea to spend upwards of a trillion dollars in the latest attempt to fix this problem.

That should terrify you, because up until now everything they've tried has failed. It has failed so miserably that this is now the only option remaining.

If this fails, we lose.

The same people responsible for this mess are telling us they now need trillions of your money to fix this and that they have no choice or the economy implodes.

Do you believe this is over?

The ride is just beginning.