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Now the bailout has been passed, "a whole new bureaucracy needs to be hired," ABC's Betsy Stark remarked, before the Treasury Department can purchase debt-ridden securities from banks "to start the process of breaking the logjam in the credit markets." That logjam has already harmed the State of California, CBS' Ben Tracy reported from Los Angeles. Its treasury has been unable to raise $7bn in short term paper and announced that it will stop paying its bills on October 28th unless it too receives federal help. Warren Buffett "has poured some of his billions into Goldman Sachs, billions more into General Electric," suggested Charles Gibson as he made the Omaha-based financier ABC's Person of the Week. In doing so Gibson offered free publicity to Snowball a just-published biography of the billionaire by Alice Schroeder.
With its billionaire Person of the Week, ABC decided not to assign a correspondent to the monthly release of economic data on joblessness. There were 159,000 fewer people in work in September than in the month before, CBS' Anthony Mason told us, "the worst month of job losses in five years." NBC's Mark Potter calculated that there are now 9.5m unemployed nationwide, 6.1% of the labor force, and "that does not include all the jobs lost this week in the credit crunch." Mason saw no prospects for improvement: "We appear to be headed into a deep recession that could last until the middle of next year."
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