So the next round in the bailout saga has been announced in which the Federal Reserve will make large loans to banks and other financial institutions taking their consumer debt backed securities as collateral. In simpler terms, the Fed is going to buy up our credit card debt and auto loans because when the loans default - as they probably will - the borrowers will have the cash and the Fed will have the securities.

This is beginning to look very much like something monetary economists call a quantitative easing. That is a monetary policy where The Fed prints money and drops it out of helicopters or something.  In this case the something is direct deliveries to overextended banks in armored cars.

In theory this release of cash into the economy will stimulate lending and as we borrow more to buy cheap Chinese crap at Walmart, the economy will once again become the lean, mean, minimum wage job creating machine that it has been.

Or maybe the banks will just keep the cash and wait for a new infusion. And maybe they would be right to do so because:

• It's dumb to risk new loans when you can get regular deliveries of cash from the Fed.

• There isn't really anybody left to lend to. As Wonks Anonymous proposed in Animal Spirits consumers don't really have the assets or expected incomes to finance a new round of debt driven recovery. If you don't believe Wonks Anonymous - and many reasonable people do not - check out Joe Nocera's blog in today's Times.

Credit markets did not just collapse because someone was having a bad day. As a nation we are overextended and addicted to passing IOUs. Just trying to revive credit markets will do nothing to address the underlying problems, which is that no one in their right mind would lend us money.

For the past near 30 years our betters have destroyed most of the good, high paying jobs and let the educational system go to hell. Instead of earning power they have given us the ability to borrow far more than we are really worth. Wonks Anonymous believes that they would be perfectly happy to let us work it off in some form of debt peonage except that they would then be able to find no one to purchase the cheap Chinese crap and would not be able to profitably employ us at Walmart.

It seems that for these folks jobs is just a four letter word.