It may be shrouded in financial technicalities, but the action of the Federal Reserve Bank and the Treasury Department to limit the effects of the sub-prime mortgage crisis has a Mencian ring to it.   Here is Timothy F. Geithner, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York today at a Congressional hearing:

“We judged that a sudden, disorderly failure of Bear [Stearns, investment bank] would have
brought with it unpredictable but severe consequences for the
functioning of the broader financial system and the broader economy,”
Mr. Geithner said in his remarks, adding that stock markets and home
prices could have fallen significantly in the event of a collapse.

“Absent
a forceful policy response, the consequences would be lower incomes for
working families, higher borrowing costs for housing, education, and
the expenses of everyday life, lower value of retirement savings, and
rising unemployment,” Mr. Geithner said.

Mr. Geithner added that
a lack of response from the Fed “would in effect have penalized” other
businesses and banks that had “behaved more prudently” than Bear
Stearns.

 Notice how he links government intervention in financial markets to the material well being of the people at large.   Mencius says that this is precisely what a noble-minded leader should do:

If you want to put my words into
practice, why not return to fundamentals?  When every five-acre farm
has mulberry trees around the farmhouse, people wear silk at fifty.
And when proper seasons of chickens and pigs and dogs are not
neglected, people eat meat at seventy.  When hundred-acre farms never
violate their proper seasons, even large families don’t go hungry.  Pay
close attention to the teaching in village schools, and extend it to
the child’s family responsibilities – then, when their silver hair
glistens people won’t be out on roads and paths hauling heavy loads.
Our black-haired people free of hunger and cold, wearing silk and
eating meat in old age – there have never been such times without a
true emperor. (17)

     Mulberry trees and chickens and dogs are not high stakes buy outs worth tens of billions of dollars, but you get the idea.  Geithner mentions his concern with education and the elderly, impeccably Mencian values.   Maybe if the financial system really is propped up by all of this (and I hope it is!), our "silver hair" folks will be living a good life.

     Additionally, the "moral hazard" problem came up:

Lawmakers spent much of the morning grilling regulators on the details
of the bailout and especially the possibility of “moral hazard,” where
risk-takers are emboldened by escaping punishment for their bad bets.

 I think a Mencian take on this would be: if there is a tension between the bad decisions of risk-takers and the material well being of the multitude, better to side with the potentially virtuous many over and against the imprudent few.  This is not so much a "greatest good for the greatest number" argument, as it is an emphasis on maintaining the material security necessary for average people to conscientiously carry out their family and social duties.  If there are some really bad actors who have brought on the systemic problem, specific sanction might be brought against them later, after the people’s livelihood (that’s for you Sun Yat-sen) has been protected.

       The only moral hazard a Mencian would see in this would be the potential jeopardy of the general welfare.