"..doing live electrical work while wearing a blindfold and standing in a pool of water"

I've decided I don't go to Crooked Timber often enough. Here's John Quiggan explaining why a 'Swedish nationalisation' - i.e. a short-term one - wouldn't be enough:

"What’s needed in the present case is not only to fix the problems of individual banks, problems on a much bigger scale than have been seen before ... but to reconstruct a failed global financial system. It’s kind of like rewiring an electrical system in near-meltdown, while keeping the power on (this is possible, but tricky and dangerous). The job is likely to be much slower than the [Swedish bank rescues], and the institutions that emerge from it will be very different from those that went in.

....Financial restructuring is going to be a huge challenge, involving both a radical redesign of national regulations and the construction of an almost completely new global financial architecture. To attempt this task while leaving the banks under the control of discredited managers nominally responsible to shareholders whose equity has, in the absence of massive transfers from taxpayers, been wiped out by bad debts, seems like doing live electrical work while wearing a blindfold and standing in a pool of water."

Which is an argument that doesn't depend on the seriousness of the current crisis per se, so much as on the need to reshape the world so it never happens again.