Bush orders financial institutions to lend out the money they've received through the bailout
•Ooops! Capitalism promotes its own interests, rather than those of the commonweal.
•I guess it's too late to bring oversight – other than jawboning – to how the recipients of bailout funds actually use their billions of windfall dollars.

Bush signs the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008
•$700 billion bailout of the U.S. financial system.
•Minimal accountability for those receiving the funds.
•The Act is understood by most Americans to be socialism benefiting those who created the crisis.

Bush proposes largest financial bailout since the Great Depression
•"People are beginning to doubt our system, people were losing confidence, and I understand it’s important to have confidence in our financial system."
•Translation: Republican governance has (nearly) destroyed the U.S.

American International Group Inc. (AIG)
(world's largest insurance company; 18th largest company in the world; conducts business with almost every financial institution in the world)
•AIG received $85 billion bailout from the Federal Reserve, which now owns 80% of the company.
•Government seizure and nationalization.

White House says no more bailouts on the way
•Stock markets register greatest losses since 9/11.

Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.
(founded in 1850; global financial-services; one of the largest and most venerable firms on Wall Street)
•Bankruptcy and liquidation.

Merrill Lynch & Co.
(world's largest retail brokerage)
•Forced sale to Bank of America.
•For $50 billion in stock; half of what the firm was worth earlier this year.

Fannie Mae
(Federal National Mortgage Association; makes and guarantees mortgage loans)
•Nationalized.

Freddie Mac
(Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation; makes and guarantees mortgage loans)
•Nationalized.

"[T]his is a mental recession... We have sort of become a nation of whiners." –Phil Gramm
(Co-chairman of John McCain's campaign and McCain's chief economic advisor; the former Senate Banking Committee chairman; shoe-in for Secretary of the Treasury in a McCain administration)
•Gramm explaining John McCain's plans to reform the U.S. economy; downplaying the idea that the nation is in a recession.

Bear Stearns
(one of the largest global investment banks and securities trading and brokerage firms)
•Government-brokered sale to JPMorgan Chase.

Economic conservatives take heart: Phil Gramm is John McCain's econ brain
(Shawn Tully, McCain's econ brain, Fortune, online at money.cnn.com)

Countrywide Financial Corporation
(largest U.S. mortgage lender)
•Avoids bankruptcy by taking out an emergency loan of $11 billion from a group of banks.

Subprime industry collapse
•More than 25 subprime lenders declare bankruptcy.

Responsible Lending Act
•The "Loan Shark Protection Act" preempted stronger state laws against anti-predatory lending.

Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000
(exempted new derivative markets from government oversight; included the "Enron Loophole," which exempts most over-the-counter energy trades and trading on electronic energy commodity markets)
•Senator Phil Gramm is long recognized as the key force in the Act's passage.

Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999
(repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933)
•Allowed commercial and investment banks to consolidate and thereby contributed to the subprime mortgage financial crisis.