Was Maximum Stupidity reacting to my diatribe? Regardless, below we have some stuff I was able to resurrect. Here's the link to Dizard, just a week before Paulson blew up the world economy: A Measured View of GSE Preferreds Here's the exact quote of Jim Grant's opinion, prior, remember, to the Fannie and Freddie weekend: ....and here's the money quote from the press release announcing the bailout of Freddie and Fannie as delivered by Paulson himself: I can't find any stories re the preferred sharemarket rout that Monday, but here's one about the consequences to the banks that held the Fannie and Freddie preferreds: Lenders With `Outsized' GSE Stakes May Need Capital (Update4) It was a whole chain reaction, where the refusal to bail out the preferred shareholders of Fannie and Freddie shut down that market for any further recaps, and injured, in a few cases fatally, the capital position of a slew of banks that held the Fannie and Freddie preferreds. After that decision and as a direct result of it, the crisis took on a life of its own. Dizard post this stupid decision sums it up: An ounce of prevention, as Ben Franklin noted a few hundred years ago, is worth a pound of cure.