^ I don't know about that. The nuts & bolts of the plan from what I can see can basically be boiled down to "free cash for your old rope". The terms are generous, to say the least. It doesn't really solve long-term problems, but it does get several institutions out of a short-term hole and that may just be enough to get things moving.
On your last point, the wider economy always lags the market by about a year or two, for pretty straightforward speculative reasons. Of course the wider economy is still dropping off a cliff. I'm not a politician, nor an economist, so I don't really care have to care about that all too much - I'm just hoping my personal equity investments start to tick back up some more. Of course there'll be fits, starts & profit-taking but I'm really keeping my fingers crossed that the past couple of weeks is the start of the long, slow climb back up.