Is that it, then? You know, the "Public Private Investor Partnership" that the Treasury Secretary introduced on Monday. Are we doing that?

The plan involves the Treasury, FDIC, and Federal Reserve putting hundreds of billions, perhaps more than a trillion dollars, at risk. That should require some sort of Congressional approval, right?

I remember the whole TARP debate last fall. I thought that was a terrible plan. I faxed my senators and representative several times, and urged them not to pass it. I was gratified, and for a brief moment optimistic, when the bill was initially rejected in the House. I felt like it was a miscarriage of democracy that Congressional leaders staged a do-over on that vote, reintroducing substantially the same plan and passing it just a few days later. That battle was lost, but this is a democracy and I am an engaged citizen. There would be other battles, I thought.

In my view, the Geithner's PPIP includes two mechanisms intended to ensure that "private investors" offer substantially inflated bids for "legacy" assets, and the net cost of the plan will be comparable to that of TARP. I might be wrong about that, but I might be right. Much of the risk will be due to loan guarantees offered by the FDIC. Is there any legal basis for using the FDIC this way? Aren't the laws describing how the FDIC is and is not supposed to behave?

And isn't Congress supposed to have the power of the purse? A loan guarantee is a contingent liability, a cost in real terms. Can the US Treasury spend money without Congressional approval, as long as it promises to spend only if a coin flip comes up heads? That's exactly what the Geithner plan (along with the scandalous but already active "Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program" program) does. Is that even Constitutional?

FDIC is a full-faith-and-credit agency of the Federal government. There's been a lot of commentary trying to explain the recently high CDS spreads on US sovereign debt. After all, wouldn't the government just print money to pay its debt rather tha default? Well, here's a scenario: Suppose the FDIC's loan guarantees come badly acropper, putting taxpayers on the hook for hundreds of billions of dollars. Suppose FDIC is short the cash, and has to come to Congress for an allocation. Given that neither Congress nor the public ever signed on to all these guarantees of bank assets, and that in fact FDIC is behaving in a manner precisely contrary to the laws under which it is chartered, the level of anger might be high enough that the public might just say no. Welcome to the world of full-faith-and-credit default.

Maybe that's why Chris Dodd wants Congress to give the FDIC a $500B loan commitment. Maybe it explains the apparently limitless appropriation of "such sums as are necessary" to the FDIC that Justin Fox noticed in a proposed bill that would actually authorize these sorts of liability guarantees. (The bill would also authorize FDIC receiverships of systemically important non-banks — yay! But it leaves out the "least cost resolution" stuff from the traditional FDICIA, and would give the Treasury Secretary and the FDIC complete discretion over whether firms are to be taken over or just bailed out in any of a number of ways.)

It seems to me that committing hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars should still be considered a serious business. It seems to me that if Congress wouldn't approve the Geithner plan, in a democracy, that ought to have some meaning, and not just get written off as populist outrage and then extralegally ignored.

So I'll ask again, who passed the Geithner plan? What deliberative assembly gave the plan a pass? What's that you say? The stock market went up by nearly 500 points when it was announced on Monday? Oh. I guess the buys have it, then.