I’m going to assume that most of you are still in one state or another of digesting the massive amounts of food you inhaled yesterday. Speaking of digesting, it looks The Treasury can’t swallow the $700 billion bankers’ bailout, or so The Wall Street Journal says this morning:

The current Treasury has so far struggled to keep up with the task of hiring enough people to handle the $700 billion financial rescue package passed by Congress in October. The man now in charge of running the Troubled Asset Relief Program, Assistant Secretary Neel Kashkari, said the department’s Office of Financial Stability, with about 40 full-time employees, is operating at half-staff.

Federal banking regulators, who must approve the applications from banks before they go to Treasury, said there is a backlog of unprocessed applications for relief. Outside observers said the difficulty of quickly building a qualified staff may be one reason the Treasury abandoned its original plans to use the TARP to purchase assets from financial institutions, deciding instead to inject capital into the banking system.

   I’ll bet some retailers would like some of that largesse to be in the hands of consumers this Black Friday:

For the holiday season as a whole, retailing analysts expect weak sales. Standard & Poor’s Equity Research is predicting a 5 percent decline, calling the holiday shopping season “the gloomiest in recent decades.” The National Retail Federation, which made one of the more optimistic predictions, said sales would increase 2.2 percent, well below the average 4.4 percent yearly increase retailers have enjoyed for the last decade.

   So, let’s see: the Treasury Department can’t get the money out the door and the retailers can’t get the money coming in the door.

   Yikes.