From the "you didn't really think this through, did you?" department..

[djsendai]

With respect to the requested $700bn bailout free-for-all:

"It's not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number."

Comments

[jminnis]

That doesn't surprise me. Mortgages in the US are around $12 trillion dollars. Something in the ballpark of 10% of that is believed to be an low teaser rate mortgage which will balloon and generally become prohibitively expensive.

Since there is no really good data to back up the amount of mortgages which will be worth nothing, Paulson had to guess a number.

[ukelele]

And it works out better for him to choose something potentially too large than to guess low and have to go back to Congress.