Total bailout cost heading toward $8T

Yep, you read that right — eight trillion dollars. Corporate socialism to the tune of eight trillion dollars. Obama’s plan looks to be in the $700 billion range.

The system, the markets and capitalism have failed on a massive scale. This might simply be a correction in the markets — a correction we are circumventing with this massive bailout — but it’s hard not to place at least some blame at the feet of the economic policies (and lack thereof) of the Bush 43 regime.

There’s a reason Congress feels the need to look into the incompetence of the SEC of the last several years. Instead of competent smaller government, Bush seems to have pressed for bloated government at every step (Department of Homeland Security, anyone) and increasing incompetence across the board with each stride.

With the ongoing financial crisis and this bailout, it really feels like Main Street is full of flaming bags of shit and the taxpayers are being forced to start stomping.

From the first link way up there in the first graf:

Sitting down? It’s time to tally up the federal government’s bailout tab.

There was $29 billion for Bear Stearns, $345 billion for Citigroup. The Federal Reserve put up $600 billion to guarantee money market deposits and has aggressively driven down interest rates to essentially zero.

The list goes on and on. All told, Congress, the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve and other agencies have taken dozens of steps to prop up the economy.

Total price tag so far: $7.2 trillion in investment and loans. That puts a lot of taxpayer money at risk. Now comes President-elect Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan, some details of which were made public on Monday. The tally is getting awfully close to $8 trillion.

Obama’s plan would combine tax cuts with infrastructure job creation efforts. Economists say it could serve as an integral piece to the government’s remaining economic recovery puzzle.

“This plan will be the first direct tool to make additions to disposable income,” said Lyle Gramley, an economist with Stanford Group and former Fed governor. “None of the other efforts have done that directly.”

Laffer on the bailout

Arthur Laffer, Reagan’s economist and namesake of the Laffer curve,  disses the ongoing financial crisis bailout. I think I’ve made my thoughts about this bailout well known. Probably two words suffices to sum up my opinion — corporate socialism.

From the (second) link:

As you read this, our government is committing enormous sums of money above and beyond normal spending, solely to stimulate the economy and prop up failing companies and markets. These additional sums are huge by any reasonable measure, with estimates as high as $3 trillion in an economy with a GDP of about $15 trillion.

Here’s the bottom line: Instead of making things better, increased spending will only drive our economy further into the ground.

And there is still a lot more spending to come. First it was a $170 billion stimulus package in February of 2008, then material add-ons to both the housing and agricultural bills, followed by Federal Reserve asset swaps with Bear Stearns and a bailout of AIG (which, by the way, isn’t over yet) and then came the debt guarantees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Shortly after that, the administration anted up $700 billion in a bailout package, and now Obama, Reid, Pelosi and Bernanke want another stimulus package of $300 billion. Just this week the powers that be are debating bailouts for Michigan’s auto industry. With the slowdown in the economy, tax receipts are now projected to fall sharply. The logic here is totally upside down, and each new measure, far from helping the economy, does enormous damage.

Bear Stearns reaches for bailout

The media may be reporting mixed signals, but the US economic crisis is going nowhere.

From the linked NYT article:

Bear Stearns, facing a grave liquidity crisis, reached out to JPMorgan on Friday for a short-term financial lifeline and now faces the prospect of the end of its 85-year run as an independent investment bank.

With the support of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, JPMorgan said in a statement that it had “agreed to provide secured funding to Bear Stearns, as necessary, for an initial period of up to 28 days.”

Update — Here’s a CFO.com article with more on this issue and about government financial regulation in general.

From the CFO.com link:

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, now dealing with his very own horror show in the melting credit markets, can probably relate.

Paulson, the former chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, has strived to regulate the financial markets with a light touch. Yet the most recent report of the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, which Paulson chairs, shows financial regulators are being pulled inexorably by the worsening credit crisis to use a heavier regulatory hand, or even to intervene directly in the market.

Indeed, today, just one day after the report was released, the Federal Reserve was forced to back a bailout of Bear Stearns. And earlier in the week, the Fed poured some $200 billion of liquidity into the market. The report of the President’s Working Group itself contains recommendations that translate into increased regulatory oversight of everything from credit rating agencies to banks to institutional investors to mortgage brokers. The report also recommends that regulators intervene with other standard-setting bodies, notably the Financial Accounting Standards Board and the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision.