Just for you:

Daily Show – Awkward loan interview.

Julien, are you sure about that?
If I remember correctly, the (first) big Paulson plan essentially had three components:
1) Give me $700 billion
2) No accountability, no supervision
3) If Congress doesn´t agree, apocalypse now

Not to mention that Paulson only wanted to buy (“bad”) securities. IIRC he expressly said that re-capitalization of banks wasn´t on the table.

That plan didn´t come through because of quite a bit of public opposition. Citizens and economists both.

How much were the presidential campaigns involved in that? Wasn´t their main involvement with the second plan introduced to the Senate?

Sure, a more respected President might have been able to sway enough votes to see it through on the first try. Still, most economists agree that the initial plan had lots of flaws. So they might have been quicker maybe but not necessarily better.

Or turning it the other way round: Without the governmental level seeing that they will actually have the support by the the legislatures, would they have been able to come to an agreement as quickly as they did?

A central European institution responsible for such sensitive questions would have to be based on a respective parliamentary body – and in the end the question is just, how unitary this body is in support of the executives.

This is why the reaction time in the US was quite slow: Because after proposing the big plan, the presidential campaigns interfered in the parliamentary process on Capitol Hill. In more stable times with a more respected president of larger majorities in the two houses, the US could have been much quicker.

Further, this didn’t happen because of leadership from the Commission, but from the much derided intergovernmental level. I don’t think, for example, that a European Banking Agency would have done better; look at the US example, where the Treasury Department has been behind the curve ever since the Lehman bankruptcy, in terms of ideas, in terms of operational effectiveness, and in terms of politics.

Would a Euro-version of this have tried the radical idea of nationalising as quickly? And if it had hit on the idea, could it have got consensus on putting it in effect? As it happened, the EU governments formed a rather good emergent community, wheeling like a flock of starlings.

I don’t see why and how the present crisis confirms or contradicts the myths you start your article with. As you point out, both “myths” can be found within this crisis, and your empirical evidence as well as your co-operation argument do not really contradict the possibility to continue to stick to one of the myths.

If this is true, your earlier statement that the standard model (the standard myths) is (are) getting old would not be proven by your later story.

But I might have missed one crucial element?