Sweden as Model for America?

Now this is interesting. Paul Krugman says in his NYT column today that the big bailout in the works has been inspired in part by none other than Sweden.

"We don’t know yet what that 'comprehensive approach' will look like. There have been hopeful comparisons to the financial rescue the Swedish government carried out in the early 1990s, a rescue that involved a temporary public takeover of a large part of the country’s financial system. It’s not clear, however, whether policy makers in Washington are prepared to exert a comparable degree of control. And if they aren’t, this could turn into the wrong kind of rescue — a bailout of stockholders as well as the market, in effect rescuing the financial industry from the consequences of its own greed."

"Furthermore, even a well-designed rescue would cost a lot of money. The Swedish government laid out 4 percent of G.D.P., which in our case would be a cool $600 billion — although the final burden to Swedish taxpayers was much less, because the government was eventually able to sell off the assets it had acquired, in some cases at a handsome profit."

Who would have thunk that we would be imitating that Mother of all Social Democratic countries! (Sweden is the beloved homeland of my ancestors, so I am very proud at this moment.)