After just watching the live press conference with Bernanke, Paulson and congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle, the ease and speed at which congressional leaders have apparently been steamrolled into submission is astonishing. It's easy to know what comes next.  Mr. Bernanke is finally going to get practically unlimited powers to take our tax dollars and buy whatever he wants. It's that "government being the buyer of last resort" theory he has.  I know we don't have the details yet, but I just told you all you need to know.  Many people will think that this is a great thing. Stocks are going to surge as is confidence in "the system". But what this will probably turn out to be is a disaster for lots of reasons, which I'm not going to get into here tonight. The question now is what does it mean for investors. It means the panic and swift repricing of assets is over. That's what they wanted. It will be replaced by a long period of stagnation and a longer period of true price discovery for assets of all kinds. We will become Japan in the 90's. In the short term stocks are going to fly, perhaps for quite a while. The shorts are toast.  They say in the short term the market is a voting machine, but in the long term it's a weighing machine. The "vote" on this will be very positive, but I'm afraid that when "weighed" in the long run it will be found out to be what it really is....a very bad idea.