Column of the Day - Black Friday Edition

It's the "Moment of Truth" on Wall Street today. Paul Krugman proposes what should have been done, and what needs to be done this weekend:

But on Wednesday the British government, showing the kind of clear thinking that has been all too scarce on this side of the pond, announced a plan to provide banks with £50 billion in new capital — the equivalent, relative to the size of the economy, of a $500 billion program here — together with extensive guarantees for financial transactions between banks. And U.S. Treasury officials now say that they plan to do something similar, using the authority they didn’t want but Congress gave them anyway.