A trillion here and a trillion there and pretty soon you're talking real money Tom Smith

And my hunch is the $1.5 trillion is based on optimistic estimates that many of these toxic assets will float once the economy recovers.  My gloomier assessment is based on admittedly anecdotal evidence from here in the heart of foreclosureland.  For instance, a big empty-looking condo complex next to the Civic Center (i.e. courthouse, jail) in downtown El Cajon, widely considered the least desirable part of San Diego County and certainly that with the highest crime rate (ten times that of La Jolla, if you don't count financial fraud).  The sign reads "Units from $350,000!!"   Three and a half for a condo in downtown El Cajon?  Somebody's holding the paper on the millions it took to build this dust bunny inhabited loser and it is not worth the little particles on the hard drives it resides on.  I think the dream of rehabilitated toxic assets is a fable created by the holders of stock and other stakes in the financial institutions.  They don't want to wiped out and they want the taxpayers to cover for them.  I think they should be wiped out, albeit in an orderly way.  Nationalizing the banks and then reprivatizing them would be better than this bailout.  What's happening now is that all of us are being forced to buy into all this real estate boom crap so that the banks that actually backed it before don't have to face the music.  When somebody asked Clarence Darrow if he was a socialist he said he would rather have the government own the railroads than the railroads own the government.  Now we are figuring out a way to do both.