Government pledges 50% of GDP to bail out Wall Street


You can be forgiven for thinking that the bailout of Wall Street was limited to the $700 billion plan passed in October. But you would be off by a factor of 10. The actual number is $7.4 trillion, according to Bloomberg News. With GDP at $14.3 trillion, that represents more than half of the sum total of all goods and services produced in the U.S.

Where are all these commitments coming from?

  • 60%, or $4.4 trillion worth of pledges, comes from the Federal Reserve -- including $2.4 trillion to buy commercial paper,
  • 20%, or $1.4 trillion, comes from the FDIC to guarantee bank-to-bank loans,
  • 12%, or $892 billion, in Troubled Asset Recovery Plan (TARP) from Congress and the Treasury
  • 4%, or $300 billion, from The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to guarantee $300 billion of mortgages.

Will the U.S. ever get this money back or is it lost forever? Can the U.S. make the interest payments on all the debt issued to finance these commitments? Meanwhile, banks have taken $666 billion in losses since the beginning of 2007 and stock markets around the world are down 38%, destroying $23 trillion in investor value. Where is our bailout?

Peter Cohan is president of Peter S. Cohan & Associates. He also teaches management at Babson College. His eighth book, You Can't Order Change: Lessons from Jim McNerney's Turnaround at Boeing, will be published by Portfolio on December 26, 2008.

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Last updated: February 10, 2012: 07:34 AM

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