In a voice vote following cloture, the Senate this afternoon passed the $410 billion Omnibus Appropriations Bill. President Obama says he will sign the bill. Via Senator Chris Dodd on Twitter:

The voice vote followed the roll call cloture vote, passing 62-35. Since final passage would be identical, voice vote is sufficient

The legislation keeps the Government running until September 30, 2009. Then what?

Here is the NYTimes with Citi CEO Vikram Pandit's memo to Citi employees:

The obvious answer to my question is, of course he will, in 2012 (Dems will probably own it in 2010.) Ezra Klein seems to believe ownership of the economy is escapable for Obama:

The nationalization conversation has, probably rightly, proceeded from the premise of what policy is most likely to work. But in the White House, the principals are also presumably considering the costs of failure. And the failure of a policy of nationalization is a scarier prospect than the failure of a toxic assets strategy. The Obama administration would own nationalization -- and its attendant effects -- in a way that they're unlikely to own a less aggressive intervention.

(Emphasis supplied.) I think the Obama political team might even believe that. I find it incredible. President Obama will own the economy (and the financial crisis) in 2012, irrespective of the policies he chooses. It is wishful thinking to believe that can be escaped. So he should adopt the policies he believes will work - not try to "minimize" ownership of the mess.

Speaking for me only

Joseph Stiglitz:

• Delaying bank restructuring is costly, in terms of both the eventual bailout costs and the damage to the overall economy in the interim.

• Governments do not like to admit the full costs of the problem, so they give the banking system just enough to survive, but not enough to return it to health.

• Confidence is important, but it must rest on sound fundamentals. Policies must not be based on the fiction that good loans were made, and that the business acumen of financial market leaders and regulators will be validated once confidence is restored.

[More . . .]

Writing about the political difficulty of "nationalization," Matt Yglesias glosses over the fact that the Obama/Geithner plan of free bailouts is a complete nonstarter politically. Matt writes:

Nationalizing banks would mean nationalizing the banks’ losses. That would cost a ton of money. Money that congress would need to authorize. If I were a member of congress, I would gladly vote to appropriate the funds. But would the actual members of congress? You can see where doubts might creep in.

Temporary takeovers are supported by the American People by 2-1 over more free bailouts. TARP was it. There will be no more. In fact, temporary takeovers are fast becoming the only viable solution politically. More. . .

I think not much longer. From the NYTimes:

Analysts say it is far too early to know if Mr. Geithner and his team will be effective. But some worry that political and financial constraints have made them reluctant to grapple with the full magnitude of the crisis.

Many financial experts estimate that the nation’s banks are holding as much as $2 trillion in troubled assets . . . To avoid asking Congress for more money, Mr. Geithner has been trying to stretch government money by working with private investors, the Federal Reserve and government-controlled companies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage giants. But that has introduced other tough policy issues, many of which remain unresolved. “Their huge problem is that the American public is not willing to accept large losses for large financial institutions,” said Vincent Reinhart, . . . “Everything they are doing is about having the smallest possible footprint on the federal budget. They don’t want to engage the Congress and they don’t want to engage the American people in that discussion.”

(Emphasis supplied.) The ostrich approach does not have much life left I think. Speaking for me only.

NYTimes:

John McCain and Richard C. Shelby, two high-profile Republican senators, said on Sunday that the government should allow a number of the biggest American banks to fail. “Close them down, get them out of business,” Mr. Shelby, the senior Republican on the Banking Committee, told ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos.” “If they’re dead, they ought to be buried.” While the Alabama senator did not say which banks to shutter, he suggested that Citigroup might be on that list, saying the bank has “always been a problem child.”

Mr. McCain, appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” echoed that sentiment without identifying any banks. Mr. McCain, who lost the presidential election last November, also accused the Treasury Department of avoiding the “hard decision” to let “these banks fail.”

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Probably few will disagree that the goal is desirable. Yet many, of faint heart, fearful of change, sitting tightly on the roof-tops in the flood, will sternly resist striking out for it, lest they fail to attain it.

-FDR, 1932

Alan Blinder, an economics professor, former Fed Vice Chairman and, as the New York Times, interestingly, chooses to point out at the end of his op-ed (will they do this for all guest pieces now?), someone who has "advised many Democratic politicians" (but never, presumably, any Republican politicians?)), writes in favor of a form of partial nationalization, the "good bank, bad bank" split (guess who gets the bad bank):

Think Progress:

The [Newsweek] poll also contains the interesting and “somewhat surprising” finding that a majority of the American public supports nationalizing the banks:

Temporary nationalization is another way for the federal government to deal with large banks in danger of failing. This is where the government takes over a failing bank, cleans its balance sheets, and then quickly sells it off. In general, which do YOU think is the better way to deal with failing banks…

29 Government financial aid WITHOUT any government control of the bank, OR
56 Nationalization, where the government takes temporary control?
11 Neither/Other (VOL.)
4 (DO NOT READ) Don’t know

More . . .

Mike Lux has a nice piece in the Huffington Post about timid Democrats:

Unfortunately for those of us in the Clinton administration, our too-cautious message, along with the "don't do anything transformative with health care" Democrats -- folks such as Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) and Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) -- slowed the Clinton health care reform effort enough that it stalled in Congress, which kept our voter base home in the 1994 elections and cost Democrats control of Congress. With our problems far worse now than they were in the '90s, I fear that these cautious Senate Democrats could damage Obama's ability to make big enough change. If that happens, voters who expected big change from Obama will be severely disappointed, and 2010 could be another 1994.

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At the NYTimes.com, David Leonhardt crunches the employment numbers:

The job market is getting ever closer to the depths that it reached in 1982. Since the start of 2008, the economy has lost jobs at a steeper rate than at any other point in 50 years . . . the decline is worse than it was at any point during the deep recessions of the mid-1970s and of the early 1980s. . . . The job market still is not in as bad shape as it was in 1982, because unemployment entering this downturn was somewhat lower than it was in 1981. But it’s getting close.

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It was just announced that the US economy lost 651,000 jobs in February and the unemployment rate hit 8.1%, the highest rate in 25 years. But the Media and the Beltway Gasbags still have time for the silliness of Limbaugh and $1.7 million to study pig odors. The disconnect is stunning.

Speaking for me only