I never thought this bill would fix the problem. It's a patch with more of a psychological benefit than anything else. Without this, the alarmist talk about four-digit multi-day drops in the DOW would probably have become reality. I suspect the "martial law" remark was a disclosure of a contingency in case that drop happened and it sparked a panic of the general population. Sometimes the best short-term thing you can do is to stop the financial panic before it spreads, buying yourself time to fix the longer-term problem.

I thought it was kind of funny that a commenter in Krugman's blog said this about the U6 graph of the last eight years: "Is it just a coincidence that the graph looks like a twisted W drawn by a drunk?"