President Bush Pushes Credit Measures; Warner to Step Down

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• JIM LEHRER:

  And to the analysis of Shields and Brooks, syndicated columnist Mark Shields, New York Times columnist David Brooks.

  David, should everyone feel better now because of what Fed Chairman Bernanke and President Bush said today about the economy and all the things that the folks were just talking about?

• DAVID BROOKS, Columnist, New York Times:

  Sanguine. Go to Home Depot, start redecorating your house. They should feel a little better, in the sense that there's activism in Washington, that people are paying attention, they're doing what they can. The Fed is obviously going to be aggressive, as we just heard from two economists.

  On the executive branch level, there are sort of two interesting issues here. One is, how big a moral hazard does the administration think they're presenting? Are they rewarding people who took bad loans and took irresponsible decisions? And I think that's what's bracketing their behavior so far, though, as we just heard, they may go more.

  The second issue, which makes this different from a lot of the banking crises in the past, is you've got a mortgage in Ohio, and it's held by a bank in Germany. And how does…

• JIM LEHRER:

  Paul Solman had a terrific piece on this last night.

• DAVID BROOKS:

  What do the Germans know about you and what do you know about the Germans?

• JIM LEHRER:

  Sure.

• DAVID BROOKS:

  And so that makes this much more unpredictable than similar situations in the past.

• JIM LEHRER:

  But you have a feeling, Mark, that the situation is under control by the folks in charge?

• MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated Columnist:

  No, I don't have that feeling. I think the president's impulse — I think, first of all, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department underestimated the dimension and the velocity of the potential crisis here in homeownership foreclosures and mortgage failures. That's the first thing.

  The second thing is, the president's whole inclination is to rely on the free market, and so now he's acting. And there is the potential here for cooperation with the Congress. Both Barney Frank, the Democratic chairman of the House committee, appropriate committee, and Chris Dodd in the Senate. The problem is going to be this, Jim, in a realistic sense. The Congress is going to go further than where the president did, as we just heard in the earlier segment with Judy, and that will be the moment of truth. Will the president — because they'll give the president what he's requested, but they'll also do more.