“Federal Intervention Pits ‘Gets’ vs. ‘Get-Nots’” via WSJ:
Since the onset of the financial crisis nine months ago, the government has become the nation’s biggest mortgage lender, guaranteed nearly $3 trillion in money-market mutual-fund assets, commandeered and restructured two car companies, taken equity stakes in nearly 600 banks, lent more than $300 billion to blue-chip companies, supported the life-insurance industry and become a credit source for buyers of cars, tractors and even weapons for hunting.
The effects are rippling into nooks of the economy far beyond Wall Street and Detroit’s troubled car industry. The massive intervention has shifted the way companies do business in a host of ways — not all of them intended by the government. Increasingly, companies big and small are competing on the basis of their ability to tap government money. A divide is opening between gets and get-nots.
