If you believe the answer to the question in the title is yes, please post a comment and tell me why. I have to agree with Jonah Goldberg's recent article essentially characterizing the government's response as a financial panic. See link. We've gone from TARP to CARP to an auto company bail out. And others on both sides of the aisle are claiming that we are not doing enough to aid people who can't pay for the houses they've "bought."
Big Bill Tilden, a tennis great before my time, had a simple approach to the game: "Never change a winning strategy, always change a losing strategy." But that presupposes you have a strategy. If Paulson has a strategy, other than throwing as much money as he can get his hands on against the wall, I haven't seen it. And of course, now every one has their hand out asking for federal money.
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One thing admits of certainty: "the" bailout isn't working, because as you point out, there has been no single plan. The ad-hoc changes in numbers and focus are probably worse, as perceptions go, than anything apart from total inaction would have been. If this is a crisis of perception, the necessary remedy is a sense either that the fundamentals are positive and will lead naturally to recovery, or that the relevant parties have correctly diagnosed the problem and prescribed a remedy. For that same reason, Bernake was very unwise to admit that the $700 billion figure for the bailout was arbitrary. Uncertainty breeds retrenchment, and people who could otherwise be hiring and investing are going to be sitting on the sidelines until the chaos -- most of which is government-created, at this point -- subsides. Thus, whatever the substantive merits of the bailout(s) might be (or have been), the implementation has hamstrung whatever short-term effectiveness it/they might have had.
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