Understanding the State of the U.S. Economic Crisis

Some of my other articles have touched on the enormity of the current credit crisis, but since this issue seems to be at the forefront of financial news lately, I'd like to take a minute to discuss the United States' situation in better detail.

According to Mike Larson, author of an article recently published in Money and Markets, in the past year or so, the United States government has loaned, invested, or promised the following amounts:

- $200 billion to help the world's largest mortgage companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, get back on their feet
- $25 billion (so far) to the three auto manufacturing giants
- $29 billion to Bear Stearns
- $150 billion went to AIG
- $350 billion shelled out to Citigroup
- $300 billion was put into the Federal Housing Administration rescue bill intended to refinance faulty mortgages
- $87 billion paid back JPMorgan Chase for bad Lehman Brothers trades
- $200 billion went toward the government's Reserve Term Auction Facility, which provided loans to banks
- $50 billion supported short-term corporate IOUs that were held by money market mutual funds
- $500 billion rescued various credit markets
- $620 billion left our country to provide aid to industrial nations, such as the Bank of Canada, Bank of England, and the Bank of Japan, just to name a few
- $120 billion more left out country to help emerging markets like the Bank of Brazil, the Bank of Mexico, etc.
- A few miscellaneous trillion dollars went toward other government promises to bail out failing institutions

The grand total of this spending spree was a whopping $7.8 trillion, and it's not over yet.

How much is this obscure number worth, you ask? Mike Larson puts it into perspective for us. He explains that $7.8 trillion is:

- Half the annual output of the U.S. economy in its entirety
- Equal to an astounding $25,507 for every man, woman and child in the U.S.
- Three-quarters of the public debt acquired prior to this credit crisis. That's right; in a matter of months, the government managed to loan, invest, or promise three-quarters of the debt that previously took two hundred years to accumulate.

If that's not quite enough information, Jim Bianco of Bianco Research offers further explanation to help us better understand how much debt the government truly owes.

He says that the cost of the current bailout plans are more than all of the following events in America's history combined (of course, he accounted for the cost of inflation, so all costs noted are in current dollars):

- The Marshall Plan, which went toward rebuilding Western Europe after WWII. Total cost: $115.3 billion
- The Louisiana Purchase, which, as you probably know, was the government's purchase of 829,000 square miles of land from France. Total cost: $217 billion
- The Apollo moon missions from 1961 all the way through 1972. Total cost: $237 billion
- Bailing out the S & L crisis. Some of you may remember that between 1986 and 1995, more than 1,000 savings and loans worth over $500 billion failed, and the government stepped in to help. Total cost: $256 billion
- The Korean War. Total cost: $454 billion
- The New Deal, which was FDR's plan to pull the U.S. economy out of the Great Depression. Total cost: an estimated $500 billion
- The Gulf War II, aka the War on Terror, including the cost for homeland security and both theaters of war operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Total cost: $698 billion
- The Vietnam War. Total cost: $698 billion
- All of the money spent to date on the NASA space program. Total cost: $851.2 billion

The grand total of the above life-altering events was $3.92 trillion, about $359 billion less than the current bailout packages. And we haven't even touched on another major event in the world's history: World War II, which would cost $3.6 trillion in today's money. Even this enormous bill doesn't come close to equaling the cost of the current bailout packages.

So there you go, a quick and simple education in the current financial crisis.

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