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$16 trillion
2011-10-10 08:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mdlbearDaily Kos: Where's Your $50,000? From Alan Grayson. Mr. Grayson is a former Congressman from Florida, currently running for his old seat back. I really hope he makes it. We need people who will speak this kind of truth.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) says that our Government has handed out $16 trillion to the banks.
Let me repeat that, in case you didn’t hear me the first time. The GAO says that our Government HAS HANDED OUT $16 TRILLION TO THE BANKS.
That little gem appears on Page 131 of GAO Report No. GAO-11-696. A report issued two months ago. A report that somehow seems to have eluded the attention of virtually every network, every major newspaper, and every news show.
How much is $16 trillion? That is an amount equal to or more than $50,000 for every man, woman and child in America. That’s more than every penny that every American earns in a year. That’s an amount equal to almost a third of our national net worth -- the value of every home, car, personal belonging, business, bank account, stock, bond, piece of land, book, tree, chandelier, and everything else anyone owns in America. That’s an amount greater than our entire national debt, accumulated over the course of two centuries.
A $16 trillion stack of dollar bills would reach all the way to the Moon. And back. Twice.
That’s enough to pay for Saturday mail delivery. For the next 5,000 years.
All of that money went from you and me to the banks. And we got nothing. Not even a toaster.
I have been patiently waiting to see whether this disclosure would provoke some kind of reaction. Answer: nope. Everyone seems much more interested in discussing whether or not they like the cut of Perry’s jib.
Whatever a jib may be.
In the next few weeks, I’m going to be writing more about this. But right now, I wanted to keep this really simple. Just give folks something to talk about when they’re standing next to the coffee maker.
The Government gave $16 trillion to the banks. And nobody else is talking about it. Think about it. Think about what that means.
Courage,
Alan Grayson
To put it another way, $16 trillion will buy enough gas to drive to Alpha Centauri and back. Twice.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-11 10:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-11 01:41 pm (UTC)"Table 8 aggregates total dollar transaction amounts by adding the total dollar amount of all loans but does not adjust these amounts to reflect differences across programs in the term over which loans were outstanding. For example, an overnight PDCF loan of $10 billion that was renewed daily at the same level for 30 business days would result in an aggregate amount borrowed of $300 billion although the institution, in effect, borrowed only $10 billion over 30 days. In contrast, a TAF loan of $10 billion extended over a 1-month period would appear as $10 billion. As a result, the total transaction amounts shown in table 8 for PDCF are not directly comparable to the total transaction amounts shown for TAF and other programs that made loans for periods longer than overnight."
Mr. Grayson is spinning things nicely, but he either didn't read or didn't understand the report. If I give a two-week loan to a friend of $500 and it is paid off on time, and I proceed to do the same thing every two weeks all year, I'm not out $13,000 - I used the same $500 over and over again and still have it after the last loan is finally paid off.
On page 137, there's a graph that shows the total outstanding loans over time, and it appears to have peaked just a little over 1 trillion (NOT a small number, to be sure!) in late 2008. By January of this year it appears (the graph is not fine-tuned enough for me to be sure) to be under 50 billion, total. Which is still a lot of money to you and me, but it's not 16 trillion.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-11 02:04 pm (UTC)