Day One

--Jan. 21, 2009—Shares of the biggest names in American banking plunged Tuesday as some investors

feared that the government would need to nationalize the most deeply wounded financial institutions, wiping out stockholders. WSJ A1

--Saudi Prince Alwaleed reports losing $7.9 billion—WSJ A11

--Irish tycoon is found dead. WSJ A12

--But let us take the one thing Truman was known for before he became FDR’s vice president: rooting out waste and fraud in defense contracts as World War II got under way. Under the Bush administration, on the other hand, contracting waste was apparently so robust, so spectacular, that we might well think of it as an official element of administration policy: waste in New Orleans, waste in Iraq, waste in Homeland Security.—Thomas Frank WSJ A15

--In Russia and France, notably, there have been high-level calls that Mr. Obama accept that America’s days as the dominant superpower are over, especially in the face of the retreat from the free-market capitalism the United States has championed. ... “America has to recognize the reality of a ‘post-American’ world,” [wrote Russia’s foreign minister, and French President Sarkozy:] “But let us make things clear: in the 21^st century there is no longer one nation that can tell what must be done or what one must think” NYT P26

--Jan. 18, 2009--At the Palm Beach Ritz-Carlton last November, John C. Hope III, the chairman of Whitney National Bank in New Orleans, stood before a ballroom full of Wall Street analysts and explained how his bank intended to use its $300 million in federal bailout money. “Make more loans?” Mr. Hope said. “We’re not going to change our business model or our credit policies to accommodate the needs of the public sector as they see it to have us make more loans.” NYT A1