JPMorgan Chase & Co. stands to reap a $29 billion windfall thanks to an accounting rule that lets the second-biggest U.S. bank transform bad loans it purchased from Washington Mutual Inc. into income.

Wells Fargo & Co., Bank of America Corp. and PNC Financial Services Group Inc. are also poised to benefit from taking over home lenders Wachovia Corp., Countrywide Financial Corp. and National City Corp., regulatory filings show. The deals provide a combined $56 billion in so-called accretable yield, the difference between the value of the loans on the banks’ balance sheets and the cash flow they’re expected to produce.

There are a few interesting storylines embedded in the piece. One is that the $29 billion writedown on Washington Mutual’s loan portfolio may actually have been too small. Calculated Risk notes that the figures JPMorgan used to calculate expected losses corresponded to a much shallower recession than has actually been experienced. PNC, for example, has been more conservative than JPMorgan in estimating anticipated accretable yield income, based on lingering uncertainty in housing markets.

But the piece also touches on two other related, and important, issues.

Namely, the decision to seize WaMu and the impact of the resulting mood on subsequent banking transactions. There is a line of thought in the financial world, originating with John Hempton but receiving a vote of confidence from Felix Salmon today, which states that it was the WaMu collapse, rather than the Lehman failure, which did most of the damage during last autumn’s financial crisis. Both incidents involved significant pain for bank debtholders — the chill wind that froze the credit markets. But while Lehman’s demise was the bigger and more stunning of the two, WaMu’s takeover was the event that turned debtholder pain from a one-off into a trend — which said, basically, that bank creditors everywhere should be nervous (a message they heeded).

What seems indisputable is that if allowing Lehman to fail was a bad decision, the seizure of WaMu was an incredibly bad decision. Increasingly, WaMu stakeholders seem to have a sound case that they received a raw deal, but it also looks as though National City, Wachovia, and Merrill Lynch were handed over on terms far too generous to the buyers, all thanks to the climate of terror that prevailed on Wall Street in the wake of the September crisis. A reference point — Bank of America’s expected accretable yield on its Countrywide portfolio is far more anemic than its anticipated yield on its Merrill loans. The difference? The world wasn’t panicking when Bank of America bought Countrywide.

What this all points to is the desperate need for clear authorization and a clear procedure for the orderly nationalization of systemically important banks in a time of crisis. We broke the glass last year and found nothing available save an extinguisher meant for much smaller fires.

Here are some of the cons of nationalizing banks, for example. It’s not pretty:

Investors in the nationalized bank would likely be wiped out. And nationalizing even one or two banks could create a chain reaction of falling confidence. If investors worried that other banks were on the government’s takeover list, they would be even more wary of investing in the financial sector.

Nationalization would also be expensive and complicated, taxing a bureaucracy that isn’t set up to operate mega-firms. And while the goal of nationalization may be to return companies to private hands, the temptation to run them for political purposes would be immense.

That’s part of the reason why, despite the growing push for nationalization, the government isn’t rushing in that direction. If the banking system truly is insolvent, however, nationalization may be the end result, regardless of the drawbacks.

A gold star for anyone who guesses that $25 billion in Federal TARP payments might have had something to do with it.

It’s worth noting, too, that Merrill’s total profits over the entire nine-year period were a negative $7 billion. Those big pre-2007 profits were fake, but the compensation was real. How can we trust these guys with taxpayer money?

With a credit crisis that deepens and changes in scope almost daily, you can’t blame candidates for trying out new ways to address the country’s problems. But these new economic plans, coming just three weeks before the election, don’t have the feel of solutions carefully thought out to tackle complex, global difficulties for an economy on the brink.

McCain announced over the weekend he had a plan for Monday, then he didn’t, then he does, but it’s for Tuesday.

Obama included an idea for a 90-day moratorium on foreclosures that his primary opponent, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, introduced last spring, with no explanation for why it’s suddenly a good idea now. All this makes McCain and Obama seem less like statesmen and more like two candidates standing in a kitchen next to a pot of boiling water on the stove, throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if it sticks.

When Clinton put forward her moratorium idea during the primary, economist Dean Baker correctly pointed out that it could lead to a wave of foreclosures as lenders would rush to take action before the moratorium. Obama’s camp says his proposal would apply only to banks that participate in the government’s $700-billion rescue package, and is meant for people who are making some payments on their mortgages, but can’t cover the full amount.

So if I’m someone struggling every month to meet my mortgage payment, wouldn’t I be slightly tempted to pay just a portion, knowing I won’t be foreclosed on, at least for 90 days? And why 90 days, anyway? Why not 95 days? Or nine months?

And what happens when the next wave of resets for adjustable rate mortgages rolls around? More moratoriums?

Today is McCain’s turn to take a crack at this, but this late in the game for both candidates, I can’t say we should expect the kind of well-thought out plans voters deserve.

Consider all that’s happening right now. We just nationalized nine banks, essentially. As Charles R. Morris points out on TWI today, the Federal Reserve in the last three weeks extended $650 billion in credit, nearly the total of the entire bailout plan. But we’re not talking about that. Instead, the candidates are quibbling over the margins of the tax code for retirement savings accounts and offering “relief” to the middle class.

It’s undignified to come up with gimmicks in the middle of a crisis. If you want to test the pasta, take out a few stands with a fork and let it cool in the strainer. Don’t take shortcuts in your kitchen.

Demand the same of your candidates.