A Chronicle of the Week when Both Shoes Dropped

You can read a superb chronicle at the Wall Street Journal of the week that started with Lehman's failure and ended with the announcement of a bailout plan.

For all officials' desire to allow markets to punish the risk-taking that engendered the crisis, banks have the upper hand. "Lehman demonstrated that it's much harder than we thought to deal effectively with banks' misbehavior," says Charles Wyplosz, an economics professor at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. "You have to look the devil in the eyes and the eyes are pretty frightening."

The funny thing is, actually, that I got this link from Paul Krugman's blog, a writer not generally associated with big government handouts to rich corporations that are guilty of their own troubles ... and he quotes it most approvingly: "yes!", he seems to say, "Main Street should have come to Wall Street's rescue earlier!"