Tea Bird

Forbes’ Wingfield and Zumbrun bring us this scoop on how Paulson and Bernanke got the $700 billion figure:

“It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”

It is, to borrow from my daughter, just another way to say “exillion” dollars.

From The Hill:

Senate Democrats emerged from a meeting Wednesday with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to report a general, conceptual — but fragile — agreement on a $700 billion plan to rescue the U.S. financial markets. 
Senators said Paulson and the Democrats struck very tentative deals on Democratic demands on oversight and transparency, executive pay limits, and

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He found that it was only yesterday that this bailout plan used the price discovery logic, and he asks what that means:

One possible explanation. It wasn’t until yesterday that they realized that it would actually be necessary to explain themselves.

But there’s another possible explanation, which I find terrifyingly plausible: the plan came first, and all

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