Anyway, I’m off to bed. But you can follow what’s going on via this liveblog from Catherine Rampell at the NYT’s Economix.

NB: Previous discussion and commentary at LP on the bailout, the financial markets crisis and the ramifications can be accessed here.

Update: via danny in comments -

1:25 p.m. | Bill passes: The bill passed 263 to 171. The vast majority of Democrats voted in favor (172 yeas to 63 nays), while a slighter majority of Republicans voted against (91 yeas to 108 nays).

Reaction and commentary over the fold.

Dollars and Sense explains why the Dow nevertheless fell:

it is becoming clear that investors are more concerned about the the breakdown of the commercial paper and interbank markets than they are about the various fixes proposed to get them going again. As well they might be.

Needless to say, the, the bill’s passage didn’t do much to sooth the CP market, or the interbank market (which deals with banks lending amongst themselves)–the latter rate actually rose. The markets clearly think the TARP package is too little, too late, at least right now: we’ll see what happens next week.

This thing has taken on a life of its own, like the proverbial monster.

Ian Welsh skewers the “government will make a profit” talking point, arguing that the bill is a “huge giveaway of money to private interests”. Mike Madden looks at what changed politically to get the bill passed. Jill at Feministe links to some alternative policy suggestions, while Larry Elliott in The Guardian favours learning some lesson from the early 90s Swedish bank crash, but warns that the crisis may turn into something that “drags on for years” as with the Japanese deflation of the same time period.

Ian Welsh reads the tea leaves of the economic consequences, and is not sanguine that Obama will pop up in January and fix everything:

And there are some ways this could be fixed. A lot of economists, like Stiglitz, are betting that Obama will eventually do a real bailout bill. We’ll see. He made no real push to fix this bill at all that I am aware of and his various economic policies have long indicated to me that he is essentially a gentler kinder Reaganite in economic terms, so I’m not so sure. Still, there are solutions, and I’ll talk about some of them in future, as I have in the past. The question is whether there will be any political will to do them. When you can pass a 700 billion bailout for the rich, but putting in real changes in bankruptcy laws to allow folks to keep their houses is unthinkable, it’s clear that the elite consensus is still that the little people are always to be made to pay to clean up their betters mistakes. Until that attitude changes, very little useful is likely to get through Congress.

And thanks to tigtog for pointing to the Money Meltdown site which has a lot of useful info and links.

Update: If you believe Nouriel Roubini is right about what’s going on, it gets even scarier. Hilzoy summarises at Obsidian Wings:

This is indeed a cardiac arrest for the shadow and non-shadow banking system and for the system of financing of the corporate sector. The shutdown of financing for the corporate system is particularly scary: solvent but illiquid corporations that cannot roll over their maturing debt may now face massive defaults due to this illiquidity. And if the financing of the corporate sectors shuts down and remains shut down the risk of an economic collapse similar to the Great Depression becomes highly likely.

In the absence of any more “game changing” impulsive madness from Walnuts, all eyes will probably be on the Veeps debate on Friday – although our friends in the House Republicans or more spectacular crashes on Wall Street might diminish the focus a tad. Sarah Palin won’t be able to pull a McCain though, and “suspend” her campaign, after that trick spectacularly failed as Walnuts slunk out of Washington calling for bipartisanship on one hand while slagging off Obama on the other, after fairly poor reviews of whatever contribution he may have made to the crisis from his fellow Republicans. Nor will Palin be dropped from the ticket – I think (presuming there’s any rationality to the McCain strategy). As Nate Silver observes, there are at least three good reasons why it would be dumb (but again, I’m thinking dumb is the name of the McCain game). And the last time a Veep candidate was dumped – Thomas Eagleton in 72 – McGovern dropped 7 points in the polls.

Anyway, that’s that for the moment, but in this increasingly bizarre campaign which in true postmodern style seems to have as fictive a relationship to the real world as all that fictitious capital swirling around Wall Street waiting for the government to buy it, who knows what lies ahead, or even what lies lie ahead. My main purpose in posting was to draw attention to two excellent pieces from two of my favourite Stateside online writers on the bizarre phenomenon that is the Palin pick, something I continue to believe deserves more analysis than just political calculation or the desire to diss implies.

First, from the aforesaid Michael Bérubé, who has been kind enough to have “suspended [his] blog retirement so that I could see us through this crisis.”

I’ve been reading the GOP campaign as being not merely an assault on liberal elites—like I say, that’s old news—but a frontal attack on the very idea of standards of plausibility in argument. To friends and family (and one or two inquiring reporters), I’ve been calling it the National Insult My Intelligence Tour 2008. It’s as if they’re simply trying to see how much amazing shit they can get away with (like this amazing shit!), even though (as many people have noted) this strategy requires them to run against the very constituency McCain had courted for over a decade—the elite Beltway punditocracy, McCain’s base.

And in so doing, they’re laying a fairly obvious trap for actual liberal elitists like me.

Secondly, the fabulous Rebecca Traister at Salon:

Everyone seems to be oozing sympathy for the fumbling vice-presidential nominee. Please. Cry me a freaking river.

Do take the time to go read both!

Context in this post about the Congressional rejection of TARP.

You can read about the latest at Crooks & Liars and Firedoglake.

None of this is about the economy. It’s about rescuing McCain’s campaign, not Wall Street. But reportedly McCain’s “help” comes down to supporting a proposal by House Republican Leader John Boehner:

That proposal reportedly includes even more deregulation and further tax breaks to the financial sector, plus a prayer that Wall Street can rescue itself if the restraints are removed.

The $700 billion bail out is wildly unpopular in the States, to put it mildly. But not because the American people are taking a stand against regulation.

Update: Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings on how the deal was scuttled. McCain’s lying about his part in it, as is now routine.