The new shitty plan is the old shitty plan

Our new appointed betters at the Treasury Department of One have unveiled their brand new plan to rid financial companies of their toxic assets. Since 'retro' is really in they decided to use Hank Paulson's initial plan, in which everyone in government pretends that all the worthless assets are really worth something and decides to pay what banks wish they assets were worth instead of what their actually worth. That if these assets were priced properly, instead of by loonies who see them as worthless, then all the banks problems are over. One key change: instead of the government buying the toxic crap under the guise of "this is so fucking brilliant" we're gonna get private investors to buy it up.....except we're going to guarantee the assets and end up paying out when it turns out they are, in actuality, just as worthless as everyone thought.

The Obama administration, striving to ease lending in the struggling economy, moved Monday with private investors to sop up bad bank assets. The administration said the program could grow to $1 trillion in purchases eventually, if it proves successful in attacking the bad-books problem that has been at the heart of the banking crisis.
...
To achieve the goal of freeing up more lending, the program would entice private investors with low-cost loans provided by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Federal Reserve. The government would also shoulder the vast bulk of the risk.

In one example used in the fact sheet, the purchase of a batch of bad mortgage loans would see the private investor put up 6 percent of the cost with the rest provided by the government, with the FDIC covering 84 percent of the cost with a loan and the remaining 6 percent coming from funds from the $700 billion bailout program.

I know what you're saying, "Didn't this brilliant plan have a name that rhymed so we'd better be able to understand and remember its full implications"? Yes it did, that name was "Cash For Trash". This time it comes with an investor subsidy. Positives? Well if you're into gallows humour, you can enjoy Paul Krugman defecating in anger/despair over the entire concept of the plan and the Obama Administration's handling of the crisis. The world stock markets also rose on the belief that thew government thinks that its just been all one big mistake and that everyone in finance and banking just got a tad overexuberant and is really just as smart and pretty as they think they are.

Other than that......you should probably be moving towards the remotest location you can find so that when society collapses you'll be away from the center of it. Paul Krugman so virulently hating an economic policy means the policy either killed his family and he's been hunting it bent on revenge for years....or it's just a really awful plan. His Nobel isn't in beard grooming, after all. As an added bonus we got to find out that the problem with government response isn't that Republicans hire unrepentant market/banker humpers, its that Democrats hire similar people too....because those are the only people that apparently exist who have any working experience within the Beast. It was so worth extending this recession by another couple years to figure that out.