Putting the #s in perspective

So the Ukraine or Hungary or Poland or one of those countries over there just got a package from the IMF for something like 12 billion? Maybe it was 15 or 18, I forget. Point being, that's much less for an entire country than even just the first injection into e.g. Citibank or JPMorgan or someone.

Anyways, it's hard to conceptualize such big numbers. 700 billion here, 306 billion there, 200 billion yet somewhere else. My friend Priya sends me this:

"If we add in the Citi bailout, the total cost now exceeds $4.6165 trillion dollars. People have a hard time conceptualizing very large numbers, so let’s give this some context. The current Credit Crisis bailout is now the largest outlay In American history.

Jim Bianco of Bianco Research crunched the inflation adjusted numbers. The bailout has cost more than all of these big budget government expenditures – combined:

• Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion
• Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion
• Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion
• S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
• Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion
• The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)
• Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion
• Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion
• NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion

TOTAL: $3.92 trillion

That is $686 billion less than the cost of the credit crisis thus far."

More here:
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2008/11/big-bailouts-bigger-bucks/

Of course, that's all a little spurious b/c it is very unlikely that all of our banks will go under and that all the assets the Fed buys will be reduced to zero value (implying that all the people behind the mortgages in these MBSs will just walk away from their mortgages.) More likely than not the government will not just lose all this money. They might even make a good deal of money, who knows. Somehow I doubt, though, that if that happens either a) we get it back or b) it's put to good use to compensate people for the pain and suffering this whole mess has caused many people -- institute an actual unemployment insurance, makes sure we have a better safety net, etc. But regardless of all of that, I just tend to think governments should be governments and not giant investment management firms, making huge bets on mortgage-backed securities.

But anyways, alls i'm saying is that just labeling this all as a cost is somewhat spurious.