I get e-mail about buying banks

No, not the Nigerian bank; my spam filters catch those. But I got this interesting e-mail about what the government could do with $700 billion and have a few billion left over:

I did the math and discovered it would be cheaper for the government to simply buy all the major players in the industry based market prices as of 3:00 today. See below:

Financial Institution Market Cap
Wachovia Bank $36.00 Billion
Citi $109.00 Billion
Morgan Stanley $31.00 Billion
Merrill Lynch $42.00 Billion
Goldman Sachs $49.00 Billion
Lehman Brothers $0.13 Billion
JPMorgan $147.00 Billion
Bank of America $160.00 Billion
Washington Mutual $6.00 Billion
Wells Fargo $115.00 Billion
Total $695.13 Billion

Note: "Today" as mentioned in the e-mail means yesterday, September 22.