Both the FBI investigation and the rumblings in Congress and the Senate are but sideshows. There were representatives this morning who had sincere doubts, but their hands are tied, They get to do token democracy, sure, but they won't be able to change the essence of the plan. Oversight? Paulson himself insisted today that he wants it, while Section 8 of the plan explicitly states there won't be any.

What I found remarkable is that Bernanke talked about maintaining economic growth, while it should be very clear that the US economy is shrinking like pants on fire. It's hard to estimate, but it would be safe to say that $10 trillion has vanished from the credit, buying power, give it a name, of the American people in the past year. So GDP growth is now a preposterous notion, but no Congressman says a word on that. More here: Growth? Where?

Jerome, there is not enough emphasis on the fact that Paulson gets to choose which banks fail, and which ones prosper. We know that most of the plan's $700 billion+ would go to Goldman and Morgan, but that's just a start. They will target banks by the dozen, to get to customer deposits, which they can do by forcing the banks to sell assets at a pre-set price. All banks will after all be made de facto government agencies. Yes, that means Paulson will be back as the boss at Goldman.

The word you will see used for all of it is "consolidation". It's a financial take-over the scale of which the world has never seen. It's not about money, it's something much bigger: power over money.