the entire financial market, and the stock market goes into freefall. Blankfein, Mack, and General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt inform Paulson they are unable to do business, and French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde warns him that he must not allow AIG to fail, as the crisis is affecting Europe as well. Unlike Lehman, the Treasury rescues AIG with an $85 billion loan. Bernanke argues that the Congress must pass legislation to authorize any continued intervention by the Fed or the Treasury. With the availability of credit drying up, Paulson's plan is to buy the toxic assets from the banks to take the risk off their books and increase their cash reserves. Bernanke and Paulson lobby Congress, with Bernanke emphasizing the potential of fallout worse than the Great Depression if they fail to act. The committee of representatives appear close to agreeing, when U.S. Senator and Presidential candidate John McCain, with great fanfare, announces that he is suspending his campaign and returning to Washington to work on the legislation, polarizing the Republicans and Democrats on the issue. Paulson has to threaten McCain not to interfere and beg the Democrats, led by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, not to back away from the negotiations. After a wave of panic and personal haranguing from President George W. Bush, the legislation passes on a second attempt and the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) is created. Paulson's team realizes that buying toxic assets will take too long, leaving direct capital injections to the banks as their only option to use TARP to get credit flowing again. Along with FDIC Chair Sheila Bair, Paulson informs the banks that they will receive mandatory capital injections. The banks eventually agree, but Paulson's staff laments that the parties who caused the crisis are being allowed to dictate the terms of how they should use the billions with which they are being bailed out. In private conference, Bernanke and Paulson lament that, although the intent of TARP is for the banks to use the loan money to restore credit for ordinary consumers, the legislation stops short of forcing them to do so. An epilogue notes that the banks did not, in fact, use the loan money as intended, but instead returned it at their earliest opportunity, and the stock market still crashed and was followed by a rash of home foreclosures. Nevertheless, bank mergers continued in the wake of