Dear All, NATIONAL REVIEW online contributes:  (I am not posting this to start a political discussion, just a financial one):

You Buy Mine, I’ll Buy Yours   [Yuval Levin]

The Financial Times reports some of the major American banks seem set to use some of the bailout money they have received and the leverage made possible by the Geithner plan to buy large amounts of toxic assets from one another—a clever manipulation of the proposed “public private investment partnership” that essentially amounts to using taxpayer resources and assurances to inflate the banks’ books by raising the prices of the assets through implicit swapping arrangements.

Francis Cianfrocca at Contentions suggests this might have been one of the scenarios Geithner’s team actually envisioned in proposing the plan. Whether it was or not, it certainly sheds a different kind of light on the risks and costs to the taxpayer the plan will involve.

04/05 01:15 PM

 The bank managers will not change their ways as long as they don't hurt from any plan to get the economy rolling. Had they been made to feel some genuine pain and shame from their actions they might have changed what they are doing. Now it is just the same old players in the same wasteful selfish gain, but with trillions of more debt to be carried by the taxpayer.  The bank people need to suffer, greatly, and learn to change.  Nothing will be better till then, and it will just another version of the shell game.  Edey