$700 billion? $700,000,000,000?

First, by historical standards, this is a low-ball figure as far as what the woebegone G. Walker administration actually wants to lay hands on. One could probably easily add another 50%, but the sheer chutzpah of demanding anything with the word trillion attached seems a psychological boundary not yet crossable.

Yes, financial markets and exotic instruments of credit are dog paddling through the crapper right now, but the establishment of a modicum of stability and an injection of liquidity via direct cash infusion and buyout or assumption of valued-questionable risk, common sense declares, requires much less than what would be the entire budget of some countries.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with — temporarily and for a fixed period not subject to extension — guaranteeing a floor price (value) to these commodities, in effect subsidizing that which is right now deemed too toxic, too perplexing to put a firm price upon or just too crucial to be dumped, baby and bathwater, into a panicky fire sale. But to outright buy them and then sell them again to the selfsame market players is to engage in precisely the trading actions which all the troubled and defunct firms have performed (acting as if the buffet were an endless free lunch and discounting or ignoring basic laws of economics covering the possibility and probability of a downturn in base commodity pricing).

What this is is not a number pulled out of a hat in the face of immediate crisis, but rather pulled off the shelf in a naked gambit to place a stranglehold on discretionary spending, the budget process and the economy for the next administration as well as to move the Congress one step further away from its budgetary prerogative.

Cynical? Maybe. But after eight years of fear-fueled hobnailed boot strides towards an imperium, not without precedent and certainly not to be discounted on its face. That the White House saw fit to send the very CEO of fear mongering and evangelist for a unitary militaristic executive, the First Dick, to Capitol Hill to lobby speaks volumes.