Very Scary Chart
Federal borrowing till end of 2007:
Federal borrowing till end of 2008:
This comes with the following scary statistic:
“The cost of the bailout ($4.6165 trillion) exceeds the inflation adjusted cost of the Marshall Plan, New Deal, S&L Bailout, Nasa’s Lifetime Budget, the Korean, Vietnam, and Iraq wars and also the Lousiana Purchase, combined ($3.92 trillion). “
The don’t panic argument comes from the fact that the above sentence doesn’t include the WWII spending which resulted in a similar debt as a percentage of GDP, and things worked out OK for the US.
The problem is that the US was more like China, at the end of WWII, essentially a creditor nation that made things for the rest of the world.
The bottom line is that the best we can hope for here is a period of very aggressive inflation as a global recovery starts. All the more reason to reduce dependence of oil during this respite from inflation.
RSS
January 31st, 2009 at 7:34 pm
[...] David Galbraith’s Blog — Very Scary Chart “The cost of the bailout ($4.6165 trillion) exceeds the inflation adjusted cost of the Marshall Plan, New Deal, S&L Bailout, Nasa’s Lifetime Budget, the Korean, Vietnam, and Iraq wars and also the Lousiana Purchase, combined ($3.92 trillion)." — Hockey stick. inflation fraud debt economics [...]
October 9th, 2011 at 7:42 pm
hi-ya, puissant blog on lardaceous loss. that helped.