Helping the little guy to save the fat cats?

Daniel Gross, referring to Bush's speech this morning, said, "Bush seems to have learned 'Trickle Up Economics."

“The recent disturbances in the subprime mortgage industry are modest — they’re modest in relation to the size of our economy,” Mr. Bush said this morning. “But if your family is — if your family’s one of those having trouble making the monthly payments, this problem doesn’t seem modest at all.”

The main objective of the package, one senior official said, is not to affect the stock markets but to help low-income homeowners, many of them concentrated in certain neighborhoods in several distressed areas of the country, such as Ohio and Michigan.

“The primary focus is to help individuals who have an opportunity to stay in their homes to stay in their homes,” this official said. “The subprime mortgage situation is having a crushing effect on a lot of communities right now.”

Administration officials, who asked not to be identified, briefed a handful of news organizations on the proposals on Thursday evening. Despite the assertion that affecting the markets is not the goal, one administration official said concern about Wall Street’s reaction did affect the timing of the briefing. He said there was a fear that if the White House announced in the morning that Mr. Bush would be making an announcement on housing, there could be confusion as buyers and sellers of mortgage securities guessed what the announcement would be.

But secondarily, this official said, helping homeowners keep their homes and refinance or renegotiate the terms of the mortgages could have a stabilizing effect on the financial institutions that have these mortgages in their portfolios, and help them write down the value of the mortgages or sell them off at a loss.

FDR would be proud.