Was it McKinley who was forced to go, hat in hand, to J.P.Morgan to get money to bail out a near-bankrupt government? Deja Vu.

As part of the program, the government plans to offer subsidies, in the form of low-interest loans, to coax private funds to form partnerships with the government to buy troubled assets from banks.

But some executives at private equity firms and hedge funds, who were briefed on the plan Sunday afternoon, are anxious about the recent uproar over millions of dollars in bonus payments made to executives of the American International Group.

Some of them have told administration officials that they would participate only if the government guaranteed that it would not set compensation limits on the firms, according to people briefed on the conversations. The executives also expressed worries about whether disclosure and governance rules could be added retroactively to the program by Congress, these people said.

A spokeswoman for the Treasury declined to comment on the conversations over the weekend.

NY Times

Capitalism searches out the darkest corners of human potential, and mainlines them.