What Do You Get For Your 700 Billiion Dollar Investment?

This is an interesting perspective:

Letters to the Editor, 29Sep08 Wall Street Journal

For $700 billion, Treasury could buy all the equity in the top 11 banks by market capitalization. Those banks have $7.95 trillion of assets representing 73% of all assets on publicly traded bank balance sheets. Or the Treasury could buy all the publicly traded banks except Bank of America and J.P. Morgan Chase. There is no compelling reason to buy just the bad assets.

James Lang
Brooklyn, N.Y.