Well, the deed is done.

Anyone want to take bets on how fast Paulson will ask for Bush’s “authorization” to release the next $100 billion? The final $350B?

If you have any question of how completely we have put the inmates in charge of the asylum, read Jon here, here, and especially here:

Back in 2000, when Hank Paulson was CEO of Goldman Sachs, he testified in front of the Security and Exchange Commission. Among other things, he lobbied the SEC to enact a “change to self-regulation” for Wall Street. He also urged them to change the “net capital rule” which governed the amount of leverage investment banks could use. The net capital rule was indeed changed in 2004, and is now blamed for the investment banks’ collapse.
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How did Paulson’s recommendation to let investment banks borrow much, much more work out?

Here’s a story from two weeks ago:

The Securities and Exchange Commission can blame itself for the current crisis. That is the allegation being made by a former SEC official, Lee Pickard, who says a rule change in 2004 led to the failure of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and Merrill Lynch.

The SEC allowed five firms — the three that have collapsed plus Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — to more than double the leverage they were allowed to keep on their balance sheets and remove discounts that had been applied to the assets they had been required to keep to protect them from defaults…

And we just gave Paulson almost a trillion dollars to play with.