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Fed Pledges Top $7.4 Trillion to Ease Frozen Credit


luckydevil

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http://bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=arEE1iClqDrk&refer=home

highlights:

Nov. 24 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. government is prepared to lend more than $7.4 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers, or half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, to rescue the financial system since the credit markets seized up 15 months ago.

The unprecedented pledge of funds includes $2.8 trillion already tapped by financial institutions in the biggest response to an economic emergency since the New Deal of the 1930s, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The commitment dwarfs the only plan approved by lawmakers, the Treasury Department’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. Federal Reserve lending last week was 1,900 times the weekly average for the three years before the crisis.

The money that’s been pledged is equivalent to $24,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. It’s nine times what the U.S. has spent so far on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Congressional Budget Office figures. It could pay off more than half the country’s mortgages.

“It’s unprecedented,” said Bob Eisenbeis, chief monetary economist at Vineland, New Jersey-based Cumberland Advisors Inc. and an economist for the Atlanta Fed for 10 years until January. “The backlash has begun already. Congress is taking a lot of hits from their constituents because they got snookered on the TARP big time. There’s a lot of supposedly smart people who look to be totally incompetent and it’s all going to fall on the taxpayer.”

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s, when almost 10,000 banks failed and there was no mechanism to bolster them with cash, is the only rival to the government’s current response. The savings and loan bailout of the 1990s cost $209.5 billion in inflation-adjusted numbers, of which $173 billion came from taxpayers, according to a July 1996 report by the U.S. General Accounting Office.

The 1979 U.S. government bailout of Chrysler consisted of bond guarantees, adjusted for inflation, of $4.2 billion, according to a Heritage Foundation report.

The commitment of public money is appropriate to the peril, said Ethan Harris, co-head of U.S. economic research at Barclays Capital Inc. and a former economist at the New York Fed. U.S. financial firms have taken writedowns and losses of $666.1 billion since the beginning of 2007, according to Bloomberg data.

“This is the worst capital markets crisis in modern history,” Harris said. “So you have the biggest intervention in modern history.”

LOL, this is beyond crazy.

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The $7.4 trillion number is really just meaningless though.
The FDIC’s $1.4 trillion in guarantees will amount to a bank subsidy of as much as $54 billion over three years, or $18 billion a year
They are counting the $1.4 trillion number, but it's really only going to cost $54 billion.

The $2.8 trillion "already tapped" number seems like a more accurate number, although even that is inflated because a lot of that is short-term debt that we are almost certainly expecting to be repaid.

...we won't really know how much this is all going to cost until it is over, but if it really costs the government anywhere close to $7.4 trillion when everything is settled, then we will be in big trouble.

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I read the article and I can't firgure out where the $7.4 trillion figure is coming from. It looks to me like they are mashing a lot of different things together that have little to do with one another. For instance, negotiating short term commercial paper is nothing like the other items.

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Don't worry. The country's in the very best of hands:

The Country's In The Very Best Of Hands

Them city folks and we'uns

Are pretty much alike

Though they ain't used to living in the sticks

We don't like stone or cement

But we is in agreement

When we gets down to talking politics

The country's in the very best of hands

The best of hands

The best of hands

The treasury says the national debt

Is climbing to the sky

And government expenditures

Have never been so high

It makes a fellow get a gleam

Of pride within his eyes

To see how our economy expands

The country's in the very best of hands

The country's in the very best of hands

The best of hands

The best of hands

The building boom' date=' they say

Is getting bigger every day

And when I asked a feller

How could everybody pay

He come up with an answer

That made everything okay

Supplies are getting greater than demands

The country's in the very best of hands

Fox Motors is connected to the nominee

The nominee's connected to the treasury

When he ain't connected to the treasury

He sits around on his thigh bone

He sits around in his fancy car

In this big congressional parking lot

Just sits around on his you know what

Up there they calls it their thigh bone

Them bones, them bones

Gonna rise again

Gonna excercise a franchise again

Gonna tax us up to our eyes again!

When they gets off of their thigh bone

The country's in the very best of hands

The best of hands

The best of hands

Them GOP's and democrats

Each hates the other one

They's always criticizing

How the country should be run

But neither tell the public

What the others gone and done

As long as no one knows

Where no one stands

The country's in the very best of hands

Them bones, them bones

Gonna rise again

So dignified and so wise again

While the budget doubles in size again

It gets them off of their thigh bone

The country's in the very best of hands

The best of hands

The best of hands

The money that they taxes us

That's known as revenues

They compound up collaterals

Subtracts the residue

Don't worry about the principal

And interest it accrues

They're shipping all that stuff to foreign lands

The country's in the very best of hands[/quote']

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