[jyl]

I looked at some studies of past financial crises - how much money governments spent to stabilize and rebuild from those crises. I forget the numbers, but as a % of US GDP, $700BN is much less than is typically spent.

In other words - expect the govt to spend a lot more money to support the financial system and the economy, before we turn the corner. At least a couple trillion $.

Is it money well-spent? Well, we saw what damage the Lehman collapse did to the credit markets, and we've now seen what damage the credit markets are doing to the real economy. C is many times larger than Lehman, so you can probably guess at the damage if C collapses. We're talking that worlds' largest bank, by assets (this might be outdated info, but anyway it is damn big).