Getting an understanding of the scope of the cumulative actions by the government in response to the current economic problems we face is tough. We are just beginning to use the term Trillion. Pillar Pacific Capital Management configured some data that I found very helpful. They took some major governmental interventions in the economy and then normed them to current dollars (made all the numbers comparable). I then put the numbers into a more visual form. To give you a perspective, in current dollars the Hoover Dam cost us a mere $782 million in current dollar terms. The Panama Canal cost $7.9 billion. The first Gulf War cost $98 billion. The chart presents the numbers for things in excess of $115 billion.
There is no comment about the relative efficacy of any of these policies, this is just an attempt to get an idea of scale.
Posts
1 comment:
Could you make another graph that would show the dollars as compared to GDP at the time or some other way of normalizing the actions to our overall ability to afford them?
Post a Comment