Rescue Bill Failure Shocks Wall Street

JIM LEHRER:

And to Margaret Warner.

MARGARET WARNER:

After the markets closed, after one of the worst days in Wall Street history, the architect of the bailout plan, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, spoke to reporters outside the White House. He vowed to try again.

HENRY PAULSON, U.S. Treasury Secretary:

I will continue to work with congressional leaders to find a way forward to pass a comprehensive plan to stabilize our financial system and protect the American people by limiting the prospects of further deterioration in our economy. We've got much work to do, and this is much too important to simply let fail.

MARGARET WARNER:

For a closer look at what happened on the Hill today, the reaction on Wall Street, and what's next, we turn to four reporters who are covering different parts of this story.

Jeanne Cummings covers Washington political and financial matters for Politico.com. John Shaw covers Congress for Market News International, a global wire service that reports on financial markets. Krishna Guha is chief U.S. economics correspondent for the Financial Times. And Joe Nocera, we hope to be joined by, is a business columnist for the New York Times. He's also the editor of the paper's Executive Suite blog.

Welcome to all of you.

John, let's begin with you because you were in the chamber watching this unfold. What was it like?

JOHN SHAW, Market News International:

It was a remarkable moment. I think, going into the vote, there was the general view that the package would pass narrowly, but neither party was trusting the other. In fact, all eyes were up on the board.

So there was a very careful calculation going on as to how many Democrats and how many Republicans were going to vote for it.

And as the set-up piece notes, there was the view by the Democratic leadership that they were willing to do some of the heavy lifting, but not all of it, and they were looking for about half the votes from the Republicans. And so that was a very intense focus for the speaker.

MARGARET WARNER:

But what could you see looking down, as the vote started to go down?

JOHN SHAW:

Well, it was very interesting, because it's hard to know really how each party does their whipping operations, getting votes, but the Democratic side was much more active.

The speaker was right in the middle of it. There were swarms of people around her. They were feeding her notes. She was carefully monitoring the vote. She was sending emissaries over to the Republican side.

On the Republican side — and, again, they may do it differently — but the minority leader, John Boehner, was pretty much alone. It didn't seem like many people wanted to talk to him. Roy Blunt, the whip, was pretty much standing off by himself. His deputy, Mr. Cantor, was also pretty quiet.

So visually it looked like the Democrats were working harder. And at one point, Pelosi looked over and saw that not a lot of movement was going on that side. And she just said, in a very loud voice, "We're finished," which signaled that she was done trying to get more Democrats to vote for the package.