[OPE] $4.28 trillion ($4,284,500,000,000) and counting

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------

Subject: Fw: Financial Crisis Tab Already In The Trillions
From: "Antonio Pagliarone"
<antonio.pagliarone@fastwebnet.it>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Astronomic crash. How can USA government sustain this
amounting in his utopian Financial Keynesanism?
ante 

Financial Crisis Tab Already In The Trillions
Given the speed at
which the federal government is throwing money at the financial crisis,
the average taxpayer, never mind member of Congress, might not be faulted
for losing track.

CNBC, however, has been paying very close
attention and keeping a running tally of actual spending as well as the
commitments involved.

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*.

Slideshow:

Biggest
Budget Items In US History

Not only is it a astronomical
amount of money, its' a complicated cocktail of budgeted dollars, actual
spending, guarantees, loans, swaps and other market mechanisms by the
Federal Reserve, the Treasury and other offices of government taken over
roughly the last year, based on government data and news releases.
Strictly speaking, not every cent is a direct result of what's called the
financial crisis, but it is arguably related to it.

Some
68-percent of the sum falls under the Federal Reserve's umbrella, while
another 16 percent is the under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, TARP,
as defined under the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, signed into law
in early October. (The TARP alone is bigger than virtually any other US
government endeavor dating back to the Louisiana Purchase. See slideshow.)

Government Entity
Sum in Billions of
Dollars

Federal Reserve

(TAF) Term Auction Facility
900

Discount Window Lending

Commercial Banks
99.2

Investment Banks
56.7

Loans to buy ABCP
76.5

AIG
112.5

Bear Stearns
29.5

(TSLF) Term Securities Lending Facility
225

Swap
Lines
613

(MMIFF) Money Market Investor Funding Facility

540

Commercial Paper Funding Facility
257

(TARP) Treasury Asset Relief
Program
700

Other:

Automakers
25

(FHA) Federal Housing
Administration
300

Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac
350

Total
4284.5

Note: Figures as of Nov. 13, 2008

*References includ
US National Archive, US Dept of Defense, US Bureau of Reclamation, Library
of Congress, NASA, Panama Canal Authority, FDIC, Brittanica, WSJ, Time,
CNN.com, and a number of other websites.

(Editor's Note:
CNBC's Steve Liesman and Sabrina Korber have been keeping a runny tally of
the government's efforts, while Sean Entwistle, Yolaiki Gonzalez, Giovanny
Moreano and Ariel Nelson researched and computed the data for the
comparisons with other major historical events in the slideshow.)

_______________________________________________
ope mailing list
ope@lists.csuchico.edu
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/ope
Received on Thu Nov 20 15:38:37 2008