Can You Say Taxpayer Bailout?

Well the votes are in and most experts in the field of finance agree that the neither the Fed nor the US Treasury can find their collective fannies with both hands. Or is it all four hands?
The Treasury's plan to create a superSIVsaver fund tanked when it was revealed that not only couldn't they put together a $100 billion bailout fund, they couldn't even organize a $20 billion one.

The collapse of the plan to create a $100billion "superfund" was embarrassing to the US Treasury which backed the scheme. The idea - to create a fund to support liquidity in the market for housing-related securities - was killed off late on Friday when the banks behind the scheme abandoned it after little interest from other financial institutions.

The former dynamic duo from Goldman Sachs, Hank Paulson, the Treasury secretary, and Robert Steel, the undersecretary for domestic finance, helped to broker the original agreement to create a massive fund to buy housing-related securities. The obvious problem was that the Fund would have wanted to purchase no "bad" paper and that was exactly the kind that banks needed to get rid of and were going to attempt to sell to it. The Fund would have only agreed to purchase "good" paper, and that was exactly the kind the banks would want to keep. Duh...

As for the Fed, Ben Bernanke, facing his first major test as Fed chairman, is getting mixed reviews. The Fed was embarrassed when the credit crisis hit in August. That happened only two days after the central bank had decided to keep interest rates unchanged and declared that inflation was a bigger risk than weak economic growth...maybe, or not. They have no idea.

Circulating among all these embarrassed banking gurus is rumor of a scheme that's gaining some currency, here's where your money comes into play. The plan would let the government buy most of these bad mortgage based securities, as much as $200billion worth, or maybe more. They have no idea.
In any case the plan would have the government holding the "bad" paper for a few years and then when the housing market rises from the grave, lo and behold, the fed could sell it all for a profit. Just like the Resolution Trust Corp. of the S&L days, and we all know how well that worked out for taxpayers. Some estimates put the taxpayers bill for the S&L debacle at $500billion. In the early 1990's Congress was still debating which taxes to raise to pay for the 1980's mess. One can only imagine how much this current mess will cost.