Oceans of taxpayer money and patience have been devoted to propping up the banking system. Why? So that when we go to retrieve our money from an ATM our money will actually come out. At least that’s what then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson told us when the big banks were on the verge of hitting the fan in 2008 and 2009.
The implication was that if the banks failed — “poof” — our money would go with them. Nobody wanted to lose their cash, not at the same time many people’s 401(k)s were being turned into 201(k)s.
The government wasn’t going to let that happen. In the heat of the crisis the federal government committed $23.7 trillion — yes, with a “t” — to make sure bank depositors could sleep at night and bank executives had a place to work during the day.
That big, scary, impossible-to-comprehend number was calculated by Kevin Puvalowski, who worked directly for Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for TARP (SIGTARP) and author of an illuminating new book about his experience, Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street.
Barofsky writes that the alphabet soup of programs actually maxed out funding at only $4.7 trillion. But again, that number, $4.7 trillion, is $4,700 billion, or $4,700,000 million, or $4,700,000,000,000.
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