One reason things didn't fall apart when Congress didn't immediately act as Paulson and Bernanke demanded, may be that there wasn't any danger of a meltdown in the first place. So say three senior economists working at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, who in October examined the Fed's own data, and concluded in an article titled Facts and Myths About the Financial Crisis of 2008 that the claims that interbank lending and commercial lending had seized up were simply not true.

"Bank lending to consumers and to non-financial companies had not ceased, and banks were lending to each other at record levels," says V.V. Charri, an economist at the Minneapolis Fed. "Maybe Bernanke and Paulson had information that they were not making public, but the available data simply did not support what they were saying." Charri and his colleagues and co-authors Lawrence Christiano and Patrick Kehoe agree that with companies like Lehman Brothers, AIG and Citigroup foundering because of toxic debt instruments, there was a sense of a financial crisis brewing, but they say it wasn't a credit freeze.

"This was a lot like the run-up to the Iraq invasion in 2003," says Charri. "You had people in government saying: `We're smart guys, trust us.' But they were either wrong or they were lying."

Adds Kehoe: "Normally, when you're going to spend a lot of money, you present the data and the economic theory to support it, yet here's the biggest non-military government intervention in history since the Great Depression, and there was no evidence presented to support it, and no detailed economic argument made about what market failures this $700 billion was going to fix."

So if you turn off your TV, cancel your subscription to the New York Times, and stop listening to a mob of self-interested shills for hedge-funds and megabanks...

The meltdown looks more like a collapsing bubble than a credit crunch, and all those trillions that were supposed to ease credit have simply vanished into thin air.

To put it another way...

We gave the economy a gigantic laxative, when what it really needed was a square meal.  

We need jobs and mortgage relief and $2 trillion to repair our infrastructure, but Bush-Obama-Goldman-Sachs have already bled out the Treasury and Federal Reserve with useless giveaways to dying megabanks, and all that's left for the rest of us is the dregs.