Unfortunate as it is, I am too insignificant to turn to some government agency to bail me out if I were careless in my work. If, in hopes of greater fame and bigger paychecks, I turned a blind eye to facts and wrote salacious columns, ruining the reputations of decent citizens, I couldn't ask the government to gallop to my rescue once I got sacked, got sued and went hunting for a bankruptcy lawyer.

But then, I am not an investment bank. The economic health of the nation doesn't rest on my paying the yard guy. American Express Co.'s bottom line will look the same whether I pay my bill or not.

No, you have got to be big, real big, to get that kind of help.

Not even the once-giant energy company Enron Corp. was big enough to get help as it sank, taking chunks of the Texas economy with it. Imagine the outcry if it had gotten some sort of government bailout.

As a small investor, I suppose I should be grateful that the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury have come to the rescue of Bear Stearns Cos., and hence to the rescue of the economy, and hence to the rescue of my 401(k), into which the current crisis has already eaten.

Thanks, guys.

At the same time, I am furious. I am furious that the banks were so reckless for so long, signing up shaky mortgages, bundling them into neat packages and selling them with spare warning of the risk. How could they not have known that the housing bubble they were so enthusiastically inflating was bound to burst, to devastating effect?

Without Notice

Regulators, few as they are over this industry, didn't seem to notice. Wall Street kept complaining about what little regulation it had to suffer. And all the while bankers pulled in hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for the splendid job they were doing.

So now, my housekeeper, my yard guy, my hairdresser and I might wind up chipping in if the Fed has to make good on its $29 billion pledge to back shaky Bear assets that JPMorgan Chase & Co. is buying.

Yes, the Fed has the $900 billion balance sheet to cover it, if need be. But if the central bank has to dip into its own assets, its dividend to the U.S. Treasury will shrink proportionately.

It isn't as if we can expect now-chastened financial institutions to do the right thing out of some sense of responsibility. The savings and loan bailout, not even 20 years old, didn't do the trick.

No More Loans

And now, fully qualified, would-be homebuyers looking for low-interest mortgages get turned away by lenders unwilling to pass along rate cuts the Fed gave them specifically to make lending easier and revitalize the economy.

And so, the gap between the rate the banks pay and what they charge for money widens. They are gorging themselves on a historically wide spread -- 2.7 percentage points, according to Bloomberg data -- between the 10-year government bond yield and the interest rates they charge for 30-year fixed mortgages.

Well, the banks have to repair the damage their recklessness wreaked on their own books, don't they? And we want them to be more careful, right?

So many Americans are losing their homes, and far more will follow as adjustable-rate mortgages adjust skyward. Sure, some have only themselves to blame for taking out loans they couldn't afford. But plenty were victimized by predatory or usurious loans.

Empty Houses

Now, with so little lending going on, and so few people able to buy, houses stand empty, neighborhoods deteriorate and the economy keeps dragging.

And yet, the Fed keeps bestowing favors on the very industry that brought on the crisis.

Some Wall Street banks ignored reports they commissioned that alerted them to the bundling of the subbiest of the subprime mortgages without sufficient warning to investors, the New York Times reported in January.

Due diligence firms the banks hired to assess loan risk got so tired of going unheeded that ``we stopped checking,'' Jay Meadows, chief executive of a Fort Worth, Texas, firm told the Times.

No wonder New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, his counterpart in Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal, and the Securities and Exchange Commission are investigating whether Wall Street banks misled investors.

Government Action

Now that is the kind of government action I like to see.

I'm not as keen about the Fed decision to open its discount window to other investment banks that need help, making billions of bucks available at below-market rates. Who's next?

The speculation, denied, focuses on Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

``If Lehman Brothers is financially insolvent, why does the bailing out of Bear make people feel better about Lehman Brothers?'' asks George Mason University economics professor Russell Roberts.

``Where does the Fed draw the line?'' he wonders.

I don't know, except that I am certain it would draw it a very long distance from me.