A $13.4 billion loan package for General Motors and Chrysler will exhaust the last of the $350 billion Congress granted the Treasury for bailout measures. The measure comes even though polls show most peole don't believe the auto industry deserves saving.

Can you blame us? The relentless rain of billion-dollar headlines, writedowns and recovery plans, toxic assets and bankrupted investors, has worn out our financial sympathies. Already, the sight of Detroit's chiefs flying in their private jets to beg Congress for money stoked popular outrage. How many more bailouts can we take?

And yet we have a month to go before anything can really happen, with Dubya a lame duck and President Change still president-elect. A blog-accelerated news cycle will make that seem like an eternity. By the time Barack Obama takes the oath of office, we may be tired of staging rescues.

That is a real danger for the heirs of Maynard Keynes, who are planning to inject hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money into the American economy. We desperately need to fix roads and bridges — remember the collapse of I-35W? — and the repair work alone could keep hundreds of thousands of people employed.

But one man's stimulus package is another man's bailout. The more plans dribble out, the more cynical we become that any of them will do any good. We need a bigger fix — and a better metaphor. A bailout, by definition is a temporary measure; water keeps flooding in. At some point, you have to patch the leaks. Or abandon ship.

(Photo via Old Picture of the Day)

There's the apartment at 133 E. 64th Street on Manhattan's Upper East Side. But there's also the beach house in Montauk, which VirtualGlobeTrotting spotted via Microsoft Virtual Earth. Decisions, decisions!

Her Facebook page has disappeared, though a public listing is still cached in Google's Web search. She's an Obama supporter, a fan of Evol T-shirts, and a fierce opponent of junk mail. What else was in the profile? If anyone snapped a screenshot, send it in. Here's her listing:

The Oedipal twist: Madoff's own sons, Andrew and Mark, turned Madoff in after he told them that the money-management arm of his firm, which ran hedge funds for wealthy investors, was "a giant Ponzi scheme." That term gets thrown around a lot, so we'll remind you of what it actually means: A scheme in which current investors are paid outsized returns not from investing profits but from money put in by new investors.

That is, according to an FBI agent's complaint, exactly what Madoff did:

deceived investors by operating a securities business in which he traded and lost investor money, and then paid certain investors purported returns on investment with the principal received from other, different investors, which resulted in losses of approximately billions of dollars.

All goes well in this kind of scheme until the money stops flowing in. Madoff told his sons that customers had sought to withdraw $7 billion, and he did not know if he could come up with the cash.

Madoff's lawyer, Dan Horwitz, touted his client's "unblemished record" to the Wall Street Journal. But rivals on Wall Street have questioned his curiously steady returns for years.

The complaints against Madoff are shocking. But mostly for the simplicity of the alleged swindle. A Ponzi scheme, in this day and age? It show the need for better hedge-fund regulation — boring! This was a rich-on-rich crime.

The case of Marc Dreier, a lawyer recently arrested on allegations of a $380 million hedge-fund fraud, is far more compelling, with faked-up websites and multiple cell phones. Prosecutors say he tried to sell fake debt instruments to a pension fund.

It all points to a much-needed sweep of the hedge-fund world. But neither Madoff nor Dreier seem to have played a significant role in the housing bubble that could end with 8 million homes in foreclosure. Yeah, the feds got their men. But we didn't get our scapegoats.