I apologise for this diary, but I am just sooo relieved that all seems well on fabulous Wall Street again.
Phew! that was a close one eh? I mean, all those insanely rich bankers nearly had to face up to their own losses, but fortunately it appears that someone claiming to act on behalf of all US taxpayers is going to jump in before any such nonsense can occur.
The US taxpayer is kindly going to underwrite all their losses, and cover their extremely corpulent glutei maximi.
In Friday’s NYT Joe Nocera likened the bail out to a hail Mary pass!
It is a weird tribute to the scale of this crisis that Mr. Paulson felt he had no choice but to rush this proposal out, because as the day progressed it became increasingly clear that the Treasury Department didn’t yet know how this mechanism was going to work. It is an idea of a plan more than an actual plan. In football, they would call it a Hail Mary pass. Sometimes, of course, a Hail Mary pass is completed for a touchdown. But most of the time they fail.
Although it all sounds so reassuring perhaps a baseball analogy would be more appropriate, because it sounds to me that Paulson and his banker chums are doing the pitching and the US public are catching it right up the jacksie!
Joe Nocera also references the potential cost in his article...
He (Paulson) acknowledged that it would likely cost taxpayers "hundreds of billions of dollars." I think it will cost more than $1 trillion.
A trillion bucks...fantastic! A trillion sounds like the kind of number a fuck up of this magnitude demands. No good having half the nation fall into ruin only to find out it could’ve all been averted by throwing a couple of billion into a dark hole somewhere. No, this is the mother of all bail outs, aimed at dealing with the mother of all fuck ups, and it’s gonna cost us a trill.
Joe Nocera wasn't the first to mention a trill, and won't be the last. In fact the trillion dollar figure is being mentioned with more and more regularity, but it's almost surreal, a trillion is a big number. A trillion is a thousand billion, a million million, it‘s such a gigantic number it‘s hard to put into perspective.
Anyway, I figured I'd try and help visualize just how much money a trillion bucks really is, and to help I've posted that scan of the $10,000 bill, I scanned it myself this morning, so apologies if my scan seems a bit rough.
In fact I was lucky to have it on me at all, I don’t usually carry many of them, but I just happened to be having lunch with a banker friend of mine today, and I'm told it's quite standard currency for bankers who like to enjoy a half decent bottle of wine with their lunch!
Anyway, try and imagine a hundred million of those $10,000 bills and you've got your trillion. That imaginary ten thousand dollar bill is just over 6 inches long, and if you were to take one hundred million of them and place them end to end, apart from taking an enormous amount of time to get them in place, your line of ten thousand dollar bills would stretch for ninety five million miles, give or take a few yards.
In other words, and physics permitting, your cash trail, and it is your cash would reach the sun, plus you’d have a few billion dollars to spare for a hot lunch when you got there.
A trillion dollars, when I think how many schools and hospitals could’ve been built for that, and universal health care? we could’ve set up a truly universal system covering the entire population of the planet, instead it's gonna disappear patching up the mistakes of a bunch of greedy piggy bankers. What a fucking joke!