It's All Coming Together

Mussolini:

The Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale, Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (IRI) was an organization set up by the Italian fascist government in 1933 to combat the global depression. Its function was to rescue floundering companies which could no longer afford to repay their creditors.

Although set up as a temporary measure, the IRI continued to run for as long Mussolini was in power. It was able to reorganise companies so that production was maintained. The main action of the IRI was to buy shares of failing companies from banks. In 1937 the IRI's powers were extended so that it could nationalise companies, although no effective nationalisation were carried out. By 1939 the IRI controlled 20% of the Italian industry through government-linked companies (GLCs)

Obama:

Apparently, the $34 billion figure (in additional funding to bail out Bank of America) is good news because BAC (Bank of America) has all those preferreds at Treasury that can be converted to common stock, leaving Treasury with $34 billion of common and $11 billion of preferreds. But Joe Weisenthal asks a good question:

If this is how the conversion goes, and the bank does pay off the remaining $11 billion over the next year or so, are they considered to have repayed TARP? How does a bank that's taken the conversion ever actually repay the TARP?

This is troubling, because it's now clear that the worry many of us had at the time of the bank bailouts has come true: the government is using its intervention in the banking system to pressure banks to give special deals to the government's special friends.