Tuesday's rundown

• The US has officially announced plans to buy stakes in nine of the largest banks to recapitalize them and help end the credit crunch. The 250 billion needed will come from the 700 billion already committed to the bailout, so this is more a redistribution of than an addition to the plan.
  

  The government is set to buy preferred equity stakes in Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp. -- including the soon-to-be acquired Merrill Lynch -- Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Co., Bank of New York Mellon and State Street Corp.

  Banks have a month to join Treasury Department's capital purchase program. They must elect to participate before 5 p.m. on Nov. 14.

• Robert Skidelsky, a columnist after my own heart, says that "Keynes would have seen it coming."

  The Great Financial Meltdown would not have surprised the British economist, who died in 1946, for he thought that this was exactly how unregulated markets would behave. The New Economics, as Keynesian economics was known in the United States until it became the Obsolete Economics, was designed to prevent such collapses. It held that governments should vary taxes and spending to offset any tendency for inflation to rise or productivity to fall. And for roughly 25 years -- from 1950 to 1975 -- they did. The developed world grew at an average annual rate of 3.2 percent without a business cycle, with very moderate inflation, and without the benefit of the huge rewards now deemed necessary to keep executives properly incentivized. Then the free-market deregulators and globalizers seized control of the engine room, and boom-bust cycles returned with a vengeance.

• David Brooks has a laff-a-minute doomsday column in the Times. 1000 monkeys at 1000 typewriters sitting for maybe 15 minutes could all produce more intelligent, nuanced articles than what Mr. Brooks puts forth, and still have 5 minutes left over for flinging poo at one-another.
• And finally, after yesterday's record performance the dow has turtled a little bit, dropping some 280 points today as we're 70 minutes from the final bell.