You guys are crazy. This is an awesome investment for the government and us, the taxpayers. They said we would make money off these bailout programs! Remember the Iraq War - it was going to pay for itself within 6 months and we would have CHEAP oil! Oh wait... what happened then? Oh-oh...
You mean China will be on the hook for it. I think we're all going to be required to become Budhists. Whats your mantra?
Landis is exactly right... Looks like this Inspector General fellow took the notional values of all the liquidity backstops, insurance and various other programs, summed them all up and came up with the nominal $23.7trn number. This includes, for instance, the writedown to 0 of all the agency MBS that the Fed has bought, which would, in turn, imply that all these conforming mtges default and all the collateral (houses) becomes worthless. Also, it would pretty much include the writedown to 0 of all US Trsy bills/bonds held by the financial system and the Fed. A better analysis here: http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/07/overstating-bailout-costs/
Mh - I thought you were a troll. You're recognition of alarmist headlines gives me hope for the new members on this board... Once more, you found a better counter-analysis and accepted it as such. Just keep in mind that right now all the shorts are pissed because I've been buying from them the past 50 days. Take notice how quiet the bear's will get when we take out 975 on volume when the good traders, the ones that have survived, come back from the coast in September. -kk (yes, still leveraged long, and still net-short google)
And to think that I was furious about $700 billion last year... Nobody is stopping these guys. None of our elected officials is willing or able to halt the sheer destructive power that these financial mafiosos are doing to the country.