September 29, 2008, was one of the strangest days in the recent history of capitalism. The investment bank Lehman Brothers had failed two weeks earlier in the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history, and Washington Mutual had failed after a bank run on the 26th. Insurance giant AIG was bailed out on the 30th. Global credit markets were paralyzed, stock markets were in vertiginous collapse, and the entire international financial system was at risk. Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. approached Congress with the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act and the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which together granted the government sweeping and unspecified emergency powers. On September 29, a little over one month before an election, Congress voted not to save the global financial system and rejected Paulson's proposal by a vote of 228–205 The Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted, and on October 3, Congress voted to pass a revised and extended version of the bailout, now loaded with petty individual handouts: some funding "for wool research," a tax break for manufacturers of wooden arrows, subsidies for Virgin Islands rum production. Such was the price Congress demanded for rescuing the global economy.