Wall Street and Washington are never soulmates. Building a coalition to bail out financiers with public money would never be easy, especially when this involves massive spending without clear aims during an election cycle.

Last weekend, Hank Paulson, US Treasury secretary, unveiled a plan to save US finance by setting up a $700bn fund to buy mortgage-backed securities. By getting them at a price above current market price but below their “fair value”, the taxpayer should make a profit, the scheme would establish a floor price for these securities, bank capitalisation would improve and banks would have swapped dubious assets for clean cash.