The bulk of what folks are calling pork are extensions of existing legislation, not new legislation. It would be interesting to see who put what item in.

The part I do like about the bill is that the .GOV has the ability to take an ownership interest in the "bad paper" out there. Why is this good? I'll tell you. They will be buying this so-called bad paper at a discount with their partners, then they will work our the underlying loans. Granted some of them have a lot of crap in them, but there will be some fundementally good deals in there, LTV wise, and even in a somewhat slow market they will be able to make some gains on sale.

Think of the money pool as a non-revolving line of credit. They get $250B to work with now, they buy some loans and once the money is borrowed, even if they pay it back they don't get to use it again. The line is paid back through the sales of loan bundles to the vultures. The vultures clean up, and so does .GOV in some cases, and both make some gains.

They "should see" what works well, and not so well, after the first go around, but we are dealing with .GOV, so they might not change processes as quickly as the private sector do. Then they'll repeat the process.

Companies involved with the RTC (resolution trust corp) after the savings & loan failures in the 80's made bank by working out this type of loan situation. I would venture a guess that this will happen again.

The best part of that bill is the FDIC insurance limits were hiked up to $250M from $100M per relationship. That's a good thing and limits the amount of structuring that we need to go through.

Not all is gloom and doom, and it should mitigate some of the fears of the general public somewhat.