Paulson’s new rules

Is his revised bailout plan better than the one he sold Congress?

Remember that $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program? asked Will Bunch in the Philadelphia Daily News online. Well, “heh heh, this is kind of funny”—Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson just “decided not to buy any Troubled Assets after all.” Paulson’s new plan—to directly bolster the financial markets, in part by helping creditworthy borrowers get loans—may actually work much better, but it highlights TARP’s total lack of transparency, oversight, or accountability.

Give Paulson “some credit for being willing to admit he made a mistake and change course,” said Andrew Ross Sorkin in The New York Times online. The original TARP law was thrown together hastily, and there were bound to be “holes in it.” He’s now trying to fix them, and while “it’s easy to call it a flip-flop,” at least he’s turning in the right direction.

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