I have had to explain the following to myriad people in recent days, so I might as well put it here.

Q:  If we can bail out Bear Stearns/Lehman/Fannie/Freddie/whatever, there is no way we can say no to  bailing out GM, American Airlines, or even an Oracle, should the occasion arise. After all, these are all big and important companies.

A: True-ish. Granted, those are all big companies, and some of them are in as much trouble as the banks and brokers. Further, you are, in some abstract logical sense, correct in saying that once you start down the bailout slide you have no real bright line test to separate the saved and the damned. Bailout-seeking sorts can cheerfully make that argument outside financials -- and even inside financials it's worth pointing out that there is a high and growing risk we'll intervene (read:bailout) more of them than we should anyway.

But that still doesn't make non-financials such ready candidates for bailouts. I could go on and on about complex systems, tight coupling, leverage, and the like, but you need to think of it in terms of mattresses.

Most companies are like wine glasses and their markets like showroom-spaced Tempur-Pedic mattresses. You have seen the commercial: You can jump up and down like a mad thing (mostly), and the wine glass doesn't tip. Sure, cross-mattress carnage is doable, but you have to really work at it.

Financials aren't like that. If you jump up and down on the financials mattress, it's like pogo-ing on an "old, metal-spring mattress": the wine glass tips pretty much right away. And not only does it tip, the fluid jets straight across to the next mattress, where people were sleeping and generally minding their own business (think of it as the tech market, if you want), and it knocks them out of bed. The process continues, until the floor is covered in pissed-off people half-drowning in wine, which then seeps through to the ground floor and drowns the dog and ruins the central air conditioner.

Financials are like that.

Does it mean there is something wrong with the financial sector? Of course it does. Any semi-regulated sector that alternates so readily between torpor and terror -- and that can screw so many unrelated sectors while doing it -- needs to be re-engineered for the real world. But that's a subject for another day.

And just because I know you want to watch the Tempur-Pedic commercial, here it is in all its glory:

Some quick links to things others may find interesting:

• Michael Lewis on Lehman: A good example of people finally learning not to buy what i-bankers are selling (Bloomberg)
• Global equity trading falls 37% so far this year, and 78% (!!) down in China (FT/Citi)
• Without policy changes, healthcare spending will be 37% of U.S. GDP by 2050 (CBO)
• Live wind map around Galveston TX as Ike comes ashore (Wunderground)
• Commercial real estate is looking a lot less valuable than it did a mere year ago (WSJ)
• Harvard Endowment returned 8.6% in year ending June, but Mendillo wary about next few years (WSJ)
• The SEC has launched a preliminary inquiry into how an old United Airlines item from a south Florida newspaper made it onto Google News front page and then into Bloomberg (Times)

The party line inside the Bush Administration about the current financial crisis seems to be that it's not as bad as the S&L Crisis was. Check the following transcript of a press conference this morning with his economic policy minions:

Q You have another major financial firm on the brink, and several other banks have failed in the last few weeks, almost one a week at this rate. Washington Mutual is in a lot of trouble. What does the White House think about this and the state of Wall Street at this period?

MR. FRATTO: I'm not going to try to characterize the state of Wall Street. Obviously, we're paying very close attention to markets. The President gets regularly briefed, as you would imagine he would. The Treasury Department is closely monitoring the markets, and they stay in contact with market participants. There's no question that the financial industry is dealing with challenges, and it's something that we keep an eye on.

Q -- that the administration could do to reassure the depositors who have been seeing more of these banks --

MR. FRATTO: Oh, you're talking about, I think, a number of different things. And you're talking about -- I think you're talking about financial markets, but you're also talking about banks. And just to put banks into perspective, when you're talking about depository institutions like banks, those deposits are federally insured. The FDIC has oversight of the depository and thrift institutions with their insurance, and no depositor who had insured deposits has ever lost a dime since the FDIC was created.

Also, I want to put something into perspective. Also, as people talk about failed depository institutions, they are dealing with a challenging environment, but if you talk about those kinds of institutions, some people try to compare it to the savings and loan crisis.

And I'll just remind you, the savings and loan crisis was a very different kind of crisis, especially even in scope, in terms of the numbers of banks, where the numbers of banks that were failing on an average year were between 200 and 300, and as high as over 500 banks in a given year that were failing. And that's not what we're seeing today.

Anyone else get the distinct whiff of a party line here with the insertion of the S&L Crisis mention? Granted, Fratto is technically correct, nowhere near as many banks have failed (or are likely to fail) in this crisis, that is missing a more important point. The costs in this case are well on their way to being much higher.

To indulge my sports science geekishness for a moment, there is some great analysis out from my friends at The Science of Sport of yesterday's claim that Usain Bolt could have run a 9.55s 100m in Beijing if he had partied heart on the way into the finish line.

In short, they say"No way". But read the whole thing.

ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" show will have Alan Greenspan this Sunday morning. Here is the blurb:

Then, in another EXCLUSIVE interview, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan shares his thoughts on the state of the U.S. economy and the government bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

With any luck Paulson won't give Greenspan another bailout to talk about this weekend.

Oodles of good stuff at The Oil Drum on Hurricane Ike's impact on oil and gas infrastructure as it makes landfall near Galveston TX. Definitely check it out.

From Charlie Rose last night, here are Robert Rubin and Larry Summers talking the current financial crisis. Definitely worth watching.

As an aside, why is it that Charlie Rose is one of the few in mainstream media taking this story seriously? He has done at least three of these hour-long conversations for every one everywhere else.