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*.
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.)
| Financial Crisis Balance Sheet |
| 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.
17 Nov 2008
Source: CNBC