By week’s end, I was more depressed about the financial crisis than I’ve been since last September. Back then, the issue was the disintegration of the financial system, as the Lehman bankruptcy set off a terrible chain reaction. Now I’m worried that the political response is making the crisis worse. The Obama administration appears to have lost its grip on Congress, while the Treasury Department always seems caught off guard by bad news.

There are times when anger is cathartic. There are other times when anger makes a bad situation worse. “We need to stop committing economic arson,” Bert Ely, a banking consultant, said to me this week. That is what Congress committed: economic arson.

Why would that be? What "burned because of congress' actions? Why does it make it worse? Here are Nocera's platitudes:

IT IS DESTROYING VALUE During his testimony on Wednesday, Mr. Liddy pointed out that much of the money the government turned over to A.I.G. was a loan, not a gift. The company’s goal, he kept saying, was to pay that money back. But how? Mr. Liddy’s plan is to sell off the healthy insurance units — or, failing that, give them to the government to sell when they can muster a good price.

In other words, it is in the taxpayers’ best interest to position A.I.G. as a company with many profitable units, worth potentially billions, and one bad unit that needs to be unwound. Which, by the way, is the truth. But as Mr. Ely puts it, “the indiscriminate pounding that A.I.G. is taking is destroying the value of the company.” Potential buyers are wary. Customers are going elsewhere. Employees are looking to leave. Treating all of A.I.G. like Public Enemy No. 1 is a pretty dumb way for a majority shareholder to act when he hopes to sell the company for top dollar.

What utter BS. AIG as a going concern will have no value. The damage to its image is immaterial. AIG was going to be a bath we were going to take. We all knew this. Nocera is really full of it here. the real issue is how do we manage the loss, and specifically, who takes haircuts in the wind down of AIG. In truth, AIG should have been in receivership immediately and now that is precisely where it needs to go. enough of these charades of AIg coming back.

Here is some more nonsense from Nocera:

IT IS, UNFORTUNATELY, BESIDE THE POINT There is a much bigger issue that has barely been touched upon by Congress: the way tens of billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money has been funneled to A.I.G.’s counterparties — at 100 cents on the dollar. How can it possibly make sense that Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citigroup and every other company that bought credit-default swaps from A.I.G. should be made whole by the government? Why isn’t it forcing them to take a haircut?

But this is precisely why it is not beside the point. there is now a much better chance that the counterpart payments will be scrutinized because of the AIG bonuses flack. It never would have been discussed otherwise. Nocera is really piling on the BS in this article. Here is some more:

IT IS DESTABILIZING How can you run a company when the rules keep changing, when you have to worry about being second-guessed by Congress? Who can do business under those circumstances? Take, for instance, that new securitization program the government is trying to get off the ground, called the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility — or TALF. Although it is backed by large government loans, it requires people in the marketplace — Wall Street bankers! — to participate.

But the problem with the TALF plan is the TALF plan itself, which gives all the downside risk to the taxpayers and all the upside gain to Wall Street. The idea that no Wall Street entity will participate in a no lose proposition is simply laughable. Hell if the AIG bonus furor ends Geithner's absurd TALF plan, I count that as another positive. Nocera concludes:

In previous columns, I have been an advocate of nationalizing big banks like Citigroup. But after watching Congress this week, I’m having second thoughts. If this is how Congress treats A.I.G., what would it do if it had a bank in its paws?

It seems Nocera favors AIG style nationalization, where the "Masters of the Universe" call the shots and the taxpayers get left holding the bag. That is a crap idea and if that is what temporary takeover is going to be, then I am against it. It turns out Nocera is another acolyte of the "Masters of the Universe," with unveiled contempt for the "little people."

Speaking for me only