This goes along with my post yesterday about a growing skepticism of the magnitude of the financial crisis:

In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.

“It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”

Did they just make it up to scare us into misguided action?