US bailout: Messy mission-creep

Meet the «aggregator bank». Sheila Bair, who runs the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation appears to fancy a giant government-backed vehicle into which banks would dump their riskiest assets. It sounds a bit like a cross between the original idea for the Troubled Asset Relief Programme and the Super-SIV plan of 2007 to aggregate various banks’ exposures to structured investment vehicles. It just might help cleanse bank balance sheets, but it’s also laden with risks. The idea is that if the as...