Money for nothing

Those central bank interest rate cuts didn't work so well for Japan a few years back.

"Economists and former Bank of Japan officials say the biggest lesson they learned was that cutting rates alone has almost no effect when the financial system has fallen into a crisis as deep as the one Japan faced in the 1990s."

This article suggests that just injecting capital into banks isn't enough.  The federal regulators also need to audit the banks and find out which ones are overloaded with bad debt.  We have to hope that the next Secretary of the Treasury will do better at this than Hank Paulson has done.  Assuming there is any money left by January.