"In one of the most dramatic two days in Wall Street's history, Merrill Lynch agreed to sell itself to Bank of America for roughly $50 billion to avert a deepening financial crisis, while another prominent securities firm, Lehman Brothers, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection."

That was yesterday. Also, yesterday, Slate — the website where everything that is up is down, and everything that is right is wrong — launched The Big Money, its financial website that cares less about whether the Dow Jones is posting gains and more about taking conventional fiscal wisdom and arguing against it.

As many wondered when Rupert Murdoch launched the Fox Business Network: Do we really need another business news outlet? Self-answers The Big Money: "In too many news stories, fundamental issues go unaddressed and fundamental questions go unasked. Lots of questionable assumptions—about the meaning of statistics, about the untrammeled virtues of free markets—inform not only the opinions offered but the way stories are shaped. In the tradition of our sibling site Slate, The Big Money seeks to puncture the assumptions, challenge conventional wisdom, and offer insights into the workings of business, economics, and finance that readers rarely find elsewhere."

What this means, inevitably, is battling against accepted truths. And while we're all for differences of opinion and the democratization of the debate, when the entire financial community thinks a bank like Lehman Brothers deserves to implode under the heft of its self-brought misfortunes, The Big Money makes the case that, hey, perhaps we should've bailed them out like we did Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac:

But lost in all the cries for Lehman—until last week the fourth-largest U.S. securities firm—to go under is a full grasp of the risks and damages that a Lehman bankruptcy could create. We're writing this before U.S. markets open on Monday, but already the dollar is dropping and U.S. stock futures are sharply down. It is not unreasonable to think that tens of billions of dollars of capital will be wiped out across the globe on Monday as a result of Lehman's collapse; it is, after all, the first large Wall Street firm to go bankrupt in nearly two decades.

First Slate turns political and lifestyle advice into a carnival game, and now The Big Money is on track to rebrand financial logic as a children's game involving Monopoly money and a shredder.