[VegasCowboy]

The short-term economic pain would have been far less than the long-term economic pain

I'm not sure you understand the gravity of the situation. The bankruptcy of Bear Stearns very likely would have resulted in much more than "short-term economic pain." The Fed did the right thing, IMO.

[pnh102]

The Fed did the right thing, IMO.

So basically our economic policy should be "let's practice capitalism, until someone screws up, and then we get the government involved." All this sort of thing does is create more reasons for the government to bail out other bad investors. We already have talk of bailing out the banks that chose to lend money to people they knew would not pay it back. Why stop there? Let's just have a command economy and be done with it.