Eight Days -- Last Year's Financial Crisis Revisited

The current issue of the New Yorker has a comprehensive article on the events leading up to the $700,000,000,000 TARP bill, but the online version is subscriber only.

A few tasty quotes:

"Hank, let me worry about the politics. You do what is right." -- President Bush to Hank Paulson, Secretary of Treasury.

"(Paulson) knew that if the government tried to cap pay then no one on Wall Street would participate -- a state of affairs that (Barney) Frank later said he found 'terribly depressing'."

"We are done!" Ben Bernake to Hank Paulson on the topic of additional measures without Congressional authorization.

"Don't call anyone else, Geithner said. If anyone hears your voice, you'll scare the shit out of them." NY Fed Governor, Timothy Geithner.

"You're getting out of a Mercedes to go to the New York Federal Reserve. You're not getting out of a Higgins boat on Omaha Beach." Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs to a banker who had just complained, "I don't think I can take another day of this."

"The kind of financial collapse that we're now on the brink of is always followed by a deep, long recession. . . . You could see a twenty-per cent decline in the stock market, unemployment at nine to ten per cent, the failure of G.M., certainly, and other large corporate failures. It would be very bad." Ben Bernake on what the consequences of failing to pass the TARP bill would be.

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And what were the consequences of passing the TARP bill? 'Cause that list seems awfully familiar.