I don’t think Petey is quite right in this comment, but he’s getting at something important. The immediate problem for Wall Street is a financial one: They don’t have enough money to survive the next few weeks absent a huge infusion of federal capital. But the financial crisis is but one system of a broader economic crisis. The reason assets have tanked is that ordinary people are losing their homes. In the medium term, boosting the worth of these assets will require aid to these people. There’s no reason — actually, there’s rather less reason — that Wall Street should be bailed out for entering into bad investments but homeowners should be forced to endure the aftermath of bad mortgages. This is a broad crisis that, for the moment, is only being addressed at the level of the financial sector. And while it’s true that you want Wall Street to survive the next few weeks rather than collapsing and plunging the world into economic chaos, you also want homeowners to survive the next few years.