Friday Unfun Links: Bailout Balance Sheet

Katherine Mangu-Ward | November 7, 2008

It's starting to feel like one of those epic nights at the bar in Washington, DC. You know, the evenings where you know you're running up a tab much bigger than you intended, but the bartender has your card, and it's just so easy to order one more round for the gang.

For those too sozzled or bozwozzled to track what we're spending on on bailouts these days, here's a quick tally:

• $29 billion for Bear Stearns
• $143.8 billion for AIG (thus far, it keeps growing)
• $100 billion for Fannie Mae
• $100 billion for Freddie Mac
• $700 billion for Wall Street, including Bank of America (Merrill Lynch), Citigroup, JP Morgan (WaMu), Wells Fargo (Wachovia), Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and a lot more
• $25 billion for The Big Three in Detroit
• $8 billion for IndyMac
• $150 billion stimulus package (from January)
• $50 billion for money market funds
• $138 billion for Lehman Bros. (post bankruptcy) through JP Morgan
• $620 billion for general currency swaps from the Fed
• Rough total: $2,063,800,000,000

That's a little over $6,800 for every man, woman, and child, or just under $15,000 for each of America's 140 million taxpayers.

Thanks (but no thanks) to Reason Foundation's Anthony Randazzo for these horrifying numbers, who also says "Oh, and keep in mind that this doesn’t include the hundreds of billions the Fed has and will buy up in commercial paper and lend out to other financial firms."