The Paul Wellstone Emergency Economic Stabilization and Non-Laminated Wooden Arrow Excise Tax Exemption Act of 2008, or PWEESNLWAETEA, just rolled through the Senate with only token opposition. The Senate and House, man. They're on the same hill, but they sure don't have much in common.

Update: Final vote, 74-25.

The politicians in Washington, especially the Republicans in Washington, are all fired up at the moment about the scourge that is mark-to-market accounting. The bailout legislation approved by the Senate Wednesday night to be considered by the Senate tonight merely tells the SEC chairman that he has the authority to suspend mark-to-market, and commissions a study on the matter. But prominent Republicans such as Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist have been calling on the Bush Administration to strongarm SEC Chairman Chris Cox into rescinding mark-to-market now.

For readers who haven't been following all this, a quick recap: Mark-to-market accounting means valuing the financial instruments on a bank's (or any company's) balance sheet at what they would fetch on the open market today, as opposed to at their historical cost, which is the way things used to be done. It's also often called fair-value accounting, and it's been the law of the land--or, more accurately, the GAAP of the land--since the early 1990s, although Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 157, which went into effect last year, tightened up the rules a bit.

The big complaint at the moment is that markets for some mortgage-related securities have so totally broken down that marking them to market dramatically understates their value and makes banks' finances look much shakier than they really are. The SEC and the Financial Accounting Standards Board put out a joint statement Tuesday clarifying that if the market for a particular kind of financial instrument really was dysfunctional, it would be okay to not to rely totally on current broker quotes or recent distressed sales of such instruments in determining their value. This wasn't so much a change in policy as an attempt to point out that mark-to-market rules do allow for some amount of flexibility. "It's mostly common sense," Credit Suisse accounting analyst David Zion said in a report to clients Tuesday.

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Today the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) released lender guidelines for the new Hope for Homeowners program that was included in the housing bailout bill Congress passed in July.

If you're struggling with mortgage payments, it's definitely something you should ask your servicer—or a housing counselor—about. The goal of the program is to refinance people into more affordable loans that are insured by the Federal Housing Administration (the FHA is part of HUD). The difference between Hope for Homeowners and other government-backed refinance programs, like FHASecure, is that Hope for Homeowners seeks to convince lenders to write down the amount of principal they're owed on mortgages. This is probably one of the best solutions for a struggling homeowner, especially if the value of the house has dropped. But it's one of the last things lenders like to do.

So the question is, Will lenders play ball?

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Apparently, Nebraska is where you go when you're running a company and want to prove to the world that everything is okay. First, he put $5 billion into Goldman Sachs, and now Warren Buffett, the Great Value Investor of the Missouri River Valley, is buying $3 billion of perpetual preferred stock in General Electric. Here's the release GE put out—note Buffett's vote of confidence. Never you mind, you people who fret about the health of GE's finance arm. And it's no surprise that Buffett got another great deal for himself: a 10% dividend on shares that are callable after three years at a 10% premium. Nice.

Barbara!

Jay Newton-Small has already explained on Swampland that the bailout legislation to be considered by the Senate today will be piggybacking on some mental health legislation that passed the House. What I didn't realize until checking on the Library of Congress's Thomas site just now is that the original title of the bill was the Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act of 2007.

In the House they called the bill the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. I'm thinking it now really needs to be called the Paul Wellstone Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. Because, you know, Paul Wellstone would totally have been in favor of bailing out Wall Street.

Economist Tyler Cowen has just posted a handy list of his views on the crisis. I found myself nodding my head in agreement on just about all of them. Go to his blog for the whole thing, but here are a few of my faves:

1. Glass-Steagall repeal was not a major cause of the financial crisis, nor was government-induced "minority lending."

2. We should use regulation to move more of the currently unregulated derivatives markets to the clearinghouse model.

3. The crisis represents a massive conjunction of both market and governmental failure. ...

5. The modified Paulson plan was better than nothing -- especially after the market had been scared -- but far from my first choice. In any case the plan would have been revised almost immediately. The Paulson and Dodd plans were never that far apart. ...

7. In the meantime the Fed should not worry much about inflation.

8. The critical deregulatory mistake was allowing excess leverage. Many deregulations get blamed but in fact contributed little to the problem. ...

10. Libertarians are overrating the moral hazard argument, as many equity holders have been wiped out. ...

15. The crisis is complex and has many causes; there won't be a simple or quick solution.