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| quote: | Originally posted by Capitalizt
What about Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac? What about backstopping $4 trillion in monkey market funds and giving unlimited FDIC insurance? We won't know the loss from those quiet bailouts until after the fact.. But the taxpayers could be on the hook for another trillion easily.. |
yeah, that's part of what I'm trying to figure out.
The overall question that I've yet to get a decent answer about is How much is the US in debt?
There seems to be two distinct parts to the debt of the US, actual debt owed and liabilities.
The money market crap is a big liability, as are some unknown percentage of corporate debts.
If I had instant data available I'd add up the debts + some percentage of the liabilities to estimate. Clearly the percentage of the liabilities that go sour is open to debate but if that debate could start then at least people would be able to make thier own estimates.
My gut tells me it is a lot worse then anyone really thinks, partly because of the amount of debt decentralization that has gone on and partly because the numbers are so big that most people don't really grasp what they 'mean'.
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Edit: For instance, 700 billion is about enough for a country to build a competative navy from scratch, when I was pricing ice breaking cargo ships (expensive by any measure) they were around 70 million, thus you could get 1,000 of them with 700 billion.
If you assume that the extra money for the ice breaking capabilities could be used to arm ships then you've got a fleet of 1,000 military vessels for the price of the bail out.
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