Felix Salmon wonders "who would be so foolish as to leak these things?" But this seems an inevitable result of Treasury's decision to delay the results so banks can argue "for a more lenient a

James Surowiecki does a nice job making a point I've been hearing occasionally. Most bubbles leave the country with something of worth. The tech bubble, say, gave the country the tech sector. The initial enthusiasm leaves the country with a bit of a hangover, but you've still got a pocket of phone numbers from the night before. It was worth it. This is all very predictable in mathematical simulations: Economic changes almost always produce bubbles. The weird thing about the housing bubble is that it was effectively worthless. Surowiecki explains:

I'm a little bit loathe to enter this subject because I'm finishing up an article on a related topic. But suffice to say that even though the data on whether being healthier would make health care cheaper is pretty mixed, we can still be pretty sure it's a good thing.

"I did not say I would be a loyal Democrat," insisted Arlen Specter on Meet the Press. "I did not say that." And it's true, he didn't say that. But people about to compete in a Democratic primary in a blue state tend not to spend a lot of time trumpeting what loyal Democrats they aren't. It's a pretty simple principle. Lots of guys are bad, inattentive, boyfriends.

The administration is expected to release the results of the stress tests this week. According to David Leonhardt, no banks will be judged insolvent. But some will be judged insufficiently capitalized. In other words, sick, but not dead.

And the Obama administration means to heal them without returning to Congress. One of the ways they'll do that is to encourage quick payback of taxpayer money from those banks that aren't underwater:

• Ben Nelson comes out against a public plan. Will try and lead a group of Democratic senators to do the same.

• Time for bank creditors to share the pain?

• Warmer weather makes people believe in global warming.

• Condi Rice denies torture, condescends to college kids.

Noam Scheiber has an interesting story in this week's New Republic tracking the effort by the banks to screw over the professional investors. The very short summary is that the banks wanted a "safe harbor provision" that would give them legal immunity from investor lawsuits if they modified mortgages. This has, in turn, generated a massive counter-lobbying campaign from the hedge funds and other types of investors. "Think of the new dynamic as a kind of Iran-Iraq war come to Capitol Hill," writes Scheiber. "Where there are no obvious good guys, the next best thing may be two powerful rivals beating each other to a pulp."