Anatomy of the bailout failure

Interested at all in the minutiae of how the House voted down the bailout bill? The L.A. Times has that here.

So what was it exactly that they voted down? You can find the text of the bill here.

And what was the reaction on Wall Street? It wasn't good! From an L.A. Times story:

Stocks plunged today as the House of Representatives shocked Wall Street by voting down the government's proposed $700-billion financial-system bailout, ensuring a continuation of the anxiety and uncertainty pervading Wall Street. The Dow Jones industrial average tumbled 777.68 points, or 7%, to 10,365.45. Broader indexes hemorrhaged even more: The Standard & Poor's 500 index sank 8.7%, and the Nasdaq composite index plunged 9.1%. Financial stocks in the S&P 500 fell more than any other broad industry group, plummeting 16%. The next-worst-performing sector was energy, which tanked 11%...

The vote threw another monkey wrench into an already chaotic stock market, prompting investors to speculate about when and whether the rescue measure would be resurrected and how the troubled credit markets would fare in the meantime. "The financial markets are in panic, and until politicians realize that, and until Main Street America realizes it's not a Wall Street problem -- it's a Wall Street and a Main Street problem -- the financial markets are going to be volatile and the decline is going to be hard to arrest," said John Spinello, Treasury market strategist at Jefferies...

Stocks around the world fell hard overnight as news of the European bailouts raised fear that the financial crisis is increasingly infecting banks outside the United States

Finally, how does the bailout plan stack up against other federal spending? Below, a graph from the L.A. Times illustrates (hat tip: Andrew Sullivan):