This wouldn't work, for the same reason that the subprime derivatives bubble collapsed. If you increase the amount of funding available to people, then more marginal teams/ideas/homeowners get funded. The actual success rate will be far lower than the historical 1 in 10, because the driving factors of success (having a market and sufficient technical ability to go after that market) remain constant, yet the pool of people going after success increases.<p>Same effect as the dot-com boom, or the Web2.0 boomlet.<p>If I were to craft a bailout plan with those $700B, I'd do it like this: $400B to go towards undergrad scholarships and graduate research fellowships for science & engineering fields; $200B to be spent directly on basic research; and $100B as a venture fund for entrepreneurs pursuing wildly ambitious ideas based on emerging technologies.<p>Currently, there's a glut of Ph.Ds and inadequate research funding, so many physics & math Ph.Ds end up working on Wall Street. This is a huge waste of talent; instead of performing basic research that could expand the capabilities of the human race, they waste their time shuffling money around. $200B could fund between 500k-1M new professors. Imagine the potential breakthroughs they could discover.<p>1M professors is definitely more than the pool of qualified Ph.Ds, so $400B goes toward increasing that pool. This could fund 2.5M college educations, or 5M man-years of graduate school stipends. Combined with increased research funding for after they finish their Ph.D, this would make grad school more attractive relative to law or business school - the old "default options" for bright young individuals who don't know what they want to do with their lives. Imagine if everyone said "I want to be a physicist" instead of "I want to be a lawyer".