Bailout More Expensive than WWII

We could be toast. A tril here and a tril there and pretty soon we're talking real money. Check this out: The $4.6165 trillion dollars committed so far (to the so-called bailout) is about a trillion dollars ($979 billion dollars) greater than the entire cost of World War II borne by the United States: $3.6 trillion, adjusted for inflation (original cost was $288 billion). Total bailout cost is looking to be ten tril, give or take a tril. Broken down in a real cute interactive at Bloomberg. (Late Add:) Big Picture has a simple and more or less easy to understand the various ways here.

Glass Half Full Bulletin: Emailer points out that lots of that money will be repaid, that in fact a little has already been repaid. Whew! For a minute there I was concerned. I forgot that hundreds of thousands of us have nearly a tril in our checking accounts.