The title of the post is borrowed from this piece in GQ by Matt Latimer, recalling what it was like to be a speechwriter at the White House around the failure of Lehman Brothers.  It is quite sensational.  Here's a passage that I found interesting:

Finally, the president directed us to try to put elements of his proposal back into the text. He wanted to explain what he was seeking and to defend it. He especially wanted Americans to know that his plan would likely see a return on the taxpayers’ investment. Under his proposal, he said, the federal government would buy troubled mortgages on the cheap and then resell them at a higher price when the market for them stabilized.

“We’re buying low and selling high,” he kept saying.

Here's my column from today's Roll Call about what Lehman et al mean for the federal budget.

Lehman a Year Later: Some Budget Lessons Learned, Others Yet to Sink In

Sept. 15, 2009

It was just about a year ago that I returned from a blissful trip in Yosemite National Park to find that the financial world had completely changed. While my friends and I were primarily focused on breathing and blisters and I was doing everything possible to avoid the news (I even covered my eyes as I walked past the boxes that displayed front pages), Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were seized, Lehman Brothers failed, and credit markets froze.

My column from today's Roll Call is about the next bailout.

Does the Government Need Financial Bailout Insurance?

July 21, 2009

I have come to the conclusion that the federal government needs to have some type of insurance for financial bailouts.

We now know that a financial meltdown has the potential to be costly and that the effect on the budget will be painful and long-lasting. Waiting until a financial disaster occurs to figure out how to pay for a bailout leaves the government largely unprepared to do so. In addition, if, like now, the meltdown occurs when the deficit and federal borrowing are already high, the situation is even more complicated.

By his own admission, Ed Andrews is not a sympathetic character in his book, Busted.  Life Inside The Great Mortgage Meltdown. In fact, he says right up front in the introduction that he was not a victim (page xii, the fifth page of the Introduction) of anything that happened to him and, at least as far as I can tell, doesn't ask for forgiveness from anyone but his wife.

That's a good thing because as the chief economics correspondent for the New York Times and a reporter that many, many people read on a daily basis, he should have known how deep the financial hole he was digging for himself and his family.

In addition, as almost anyone in the economic blogsphere knows (Megan McArdle over the The Atlantic lead the charge), Andrews has been heavily criticized for not including the fact that his wife had declared bankruptcy twice before.  That he now admits that was a mistake doesn't make it any less important an omission.