I’ve been out of town, and have not studied all the available details of the Bush administration plan. But I have a few observations.

1. I suspect that Hyman Minsky, the economist who wrote that stability can be destabilizing, and whom I was surprised to hear being quoted by a Bush administration official a few months ago, would have forecast such a gigantic bailout long before it happened.

2. It is unsettling to see Wall Street firms that only a week ago feared for their survival hoping to get rich off this program. It needs to be carefully monitored to keep it from becoming a scandal of its own.

3. The Bush administration was a little slow to decide this was a huge crisis, but they reverted to form when they did. They want Congress to give them a blank check to do whatever they want, whatever the cost, with no one able to watch them closely.

4. Hank Paulson is a lot more competent than some of the people who gave the Bush administration a reputation for incompetence — remember the stories of being unable to account for suitcases full of cash in Iraq? — but it would be no insult to him to insist on better monitoring. If nothing else, he will not be Treasury secretary for very long, since the new president will undoubtedly replace him. Some kind of board should be established, and all the officials on the board should share responsibility for major decisions.

5. This crisis is not so urgent that a bill really needs to be passed without time for the public to read it and study it. If Congress has to delay leaving to campaign for a few days, so be it.

6. This is not similar to the Resolution Trust Corporation. The assets it liquidated were acquired when failed savings and loans were taken over by the government. There was no question of purchase price. Here purchase price is crucial. What are the safeguards to prevent cronies and contributors from getting favorable deals, either in selling assets or in purchasing them?

7. The prices paid for assets should be transparent to the public, and some way should be found to allow others to bid for them, in at least some cases. That would help to assure that the price being paid was a fair one.

8. The decisions made by the bailout agency will be critical to communities and to struggling homeowners. If the board is lenient in restructuring the millions of mortgages it will control, it can reduce foreclosures, at a possible cost to taxpayers. But the risks that it will be lenient to those with clout are real, and forgiving every loan is not a great idea.

9. Among the worst mistakes made in the savings and loan crisis was to allow the institutions to devise special accounting rules, to make themselves look better than they were and to keep them going when they should have been closed down. You would think no one would want to repeat that, but there are rumors that banks are asking that Congress allow them to stop marking assets to market, on the theory that having to tell the truth about their bad decisions, rather than the decisions themselves, caused this problem.

10. This might not have been needed, at least not now, if the Fed and Treasury had stuck to their own game plan in Bear Stearns, to bail out creditors but not shareholders. We need to learn who pressed to force Lehman to fail completely. That decision led directly to the run on money market funds and to panicked trading conditions for credit default swaps at other brokerage firms.

11. Investors clearly think the shareholders of brokerage firms and banks are being bailed out — not just that failure is being avoided. That should not be allowed to happen. If there is no penalty at all for these disasters, we are more likely to see repeats somewhere down the road. That is far more important than whether a few executives get undeserved bonuses, but the issue of bonuses is more attractive to politicians and may get more Congressional attention than issues of whether the government overpays for assets.