Wednesday, November 19, 2008

The US Mortgage Crisis Taxpayer Tab: $4.28 TRILLION and counting…

In the face of this crisis, how much money has the US government thrown to “save the system” so far?

CNBC has this tabulation…

``Try $4.28 trillion dollars. That's $4,284,500,000,000 and more than what was spent on WW II, if adjusted for inflation, based on our computations from a variety of estimates and sources.”

Incredible. $4.28 trillion +++ as the days go by! And that's about 30% of the US GDP.

Makes you wonder who's gonna pay for all these and how one can be bullish on the US dollar, except when considering the recent spate of the deleveraging process-which is a short term dynamic.

Table below as of November 18, are CNBC’s estimates (see article)…

Great stuff from CNBC

Also, CNBC made a nifty comparison of how this bill has dwarfed the other major taxpayer programs in the past as shown through this slideshow
.

Here are 3 of the ten, courtesy of CNBC.

World War II

Original Cost: $288 billion

Inflation Adjusted Cost: $3.6 trillion


NASA (Cumulative)

Original Cost: $416.7 billion

Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion

Vietnam War

Original Cost: $111 billion

Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion

(Pictured: Pres. Lyndon Johnson and Sen. Richard Russell)

Check CNBC slideshow for the write up and the rest of the other largest taxpayer bill

(Hat Tip: Mr. C. McCarty)


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Amazing number!

But in every case the governement took securities in exchange, surely they are worth in the order of $2T, no?