Bailout Compared to 9 Other Events Combined
DON’T get out your calculator unless you’re comfortable with scientific notation, or your calculator has at least 15 digits in the display. The total is $4.3 trillion or $4,300,000,000,000.00 or 4.3 x 10E11 (4.3 times ten to the eleventh power).
The following video clip from the Nov. 25, 2008 MSNBC Rachel Maddow Show demonstrates just how big this financial crisis is getting to be. The part of the 10 minute segment I want you to watch starts at about 2 minutes 40 seconds and runs about 1 minute 3 seconds to 3 minutes 43 seconds into the clip. If you’re not interested in the whole segment you can fast forward to that time and stop watching after it.
So, let’s review: the Bush bailout is costing us, the taxpayers, adjusted for inflation, meaning in today’s dollars, more than
- the Marshall Plan
- the Louisiana Purchase
- the Race to the Moon
- the Savings and Loan Crisis
- the Korean War
- the New Deal (the one from the Great Depression in the 1930′s)
- the Iraq War
- the Vietnam War
- the total lifetime budget of NASA
COMBINED.
Add all those costs up after adjusting them for inflation to today’s dollars and that’s what this bailout is costing us. Let that context sink in because it gets worse and it’s important to have somewhat of a grasp on the situation before we go on. Maybe it’s more like a realization about how little of a grasp we can get on it?
Now, realize that even more money has been committed to the financial crisis since the $4.3 trillion was calculated. The amount as of November 26, 2008 is $7.8 trillion. We’re only about $800 billion from doubling the cost of the above events (that would be $8.6 trillion). See the sources section below for a link to the new article. There is a big chart that explains the situation very well.
As always, please leave your thoughts in the comments below.
Trying to understand WTF is really going on,
Sherri
Other Sources:
Bailout Nation by Barry Ritholtz which will be coming out on January 15, 2009. Barry Ritholtz is CEO and director of equity research at FusionIQ.com, an online quantitative research firm. He regularly appears as an expert on CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox, and PBS, and he is the author of the topranked financial blog, The Big Picture, hailed by The Wall Street Journal as “what the in-crowd knows”.
You can get your copy of the book here:
$7.8 Trillion Total Bailout Commitment
by Barry Ritholtz
The Big Picture, November 26, 2008
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2008/11/78-trillion-bailout/
