On Dec 28, 2009, at 1:26 AM, dredmond at efn.org wrote:
> TARP was the tip of the rentier subsidy iceberg. True cost of the
> bailout:
> $14 trillion (Nomi Prins, bless her soul, has the gory details:
> http://www.nomiprins.com/bailout.html).
An awful lot of that total is Federal Reserve magic money - guarantees, supports, facilities, etc. etc. I really don't understand just what the economic significance is of these sorts of things. I do know that they don't really represent the transfer of actual resources, unlike taxpayer funds. So this $14t number is in large part fictitious - what James Grant calls money of the mind.
Doug