The Real Size of the Bailout
See More Charts 
The price tag for the Wall Street bailout is often put at $700 billion—the size of the Troubled Assets Relief Program. But TARP is just the tip of the iceberg of money paid out or set aside by the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve. In her book, It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street, Nomi Prins uncovers the hush-hush programs and crunches the hidden numbers to calculate the shocking actual size of the bailout: $14.4 trillion and counting.
(Figures current as of October 31, 2009. Click here for an explanation of the abbreviations and programs below.)
This chart is part of Mother Jones' coverage of the financial crisis, one year later.
Learn more about Wall Street's accountability deficit.
Comments
More explication is needed-
More explication is needed- for example, what is MMMF and Commercial Paper Funding Facility just to take two large ones.
re: more explication
Hi Raoul,
We will be posting an explanation of all the programs and the crazy abbreviations later today.
To answer your questions, the MMMF was the Treasury's offer to guarantee more than $3 trillion worth of money market mutual funds. The Commercial Paper Funding Facility is a Fed program that buys commercial paper—short-term debts—from banks and other firms. This attempt to inject liquidity into corporate lending could cost up to $1.8 trillion, according to SIGTARP.
More details soon.
Dave Gilson
Senior editor, Mother Jones
re: more explication
Our explanation of all the pieces of this puzzle has been posted:
http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/12/behind-real-size-bailout
Imagine if a tenth of that
Imagine if a tenth of that were spent on climate change. Just depressing.
re: Imagine...
We have a stat for that, too:
http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/01/what-else-could-14-trillion-buy
Frightening To See
The numbers are hard to comprehend, as well as the devastation the occurred to so many families.
The Numbers -Best article for Perspective on $:
Some of the more aware analysts onKitco -predicted this whole deliberate theft of Trillions long ago:
This analysis - tho old & using old estimates of the costs (8 trillion) puts the Staggering degree of financial Terrorism these flks who OWN the District of Corruption have been able to get Scot-free away with:
See:
http://www.24hgold.com/english/contributor.aspx?contributor=Olivier%20Ga...
Thanks
Really Misleading
I find this article quite misleading.
For example, you imply that the Treasury's MMMF guarantee program could have cost us $3.7 trillion (the total value of the entire MMMF market). Yet, the treasury only put up $50 billion from the Exchange Stabilization Fund (http://www.ustreas.gov/press/releases/hp1161.htm), didn't lose a penny ,and in fact made a small profit (see http://www.ustreas.gov/press/releases/hp1161.htm).
Similarly, you list the Fed's CPFF at $1.8 trillion, once again the size of the entire market. Yet, the most the Fed ever lent out was $350 billion, of which all but $9 billion was paid off as of Dec 31, 2009. As of March, 2010, less than $3 billion is outstanding, and it's clear that the Fed made a small profit on the interest on these loans (source: http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h41/Current/).
If I didn't know better, I'd think you were sensationalizing a la Fox News. Which is a shame becasue it reduces the credibility of those of us that are concerned by a system that privatizes profits while socializing risks.
Post new comment
MoJo Comments: Send Us Your Feedback
We changed our spam software to better filter comments. Should you encounter any issues, please let us know.
