More Expensive Than World War 2  

Michael West has a column in the SMH outlining just how expensive recent bailouts have been, noting that the US government as spent more on bailing out victims of the financial crisis than it did on World War 2 - More please, Sirs.

It's an uphill slog for Ben Bernanke trying to coax people to trust the banks when the banks don't even trust each other - although it doesn't appear to have deterred him in the least from extending the hand for further lashings of corporate welfare.

It was fitting that the US central banker delivered his first public policy speech in the city of Charles Dickens last night as his message was ''More please, Sir''.

Fiscal stimulus alone would not be enough to deliver a lasting US recovery, said Bernanke at the London School of Economics. The Government may need to inject more capital into the banks. The sheer burden of distressed assets on their balance sheets made it hard for them to lend and raise new capital, the poor dears.

Once again, indefatigueably, the world's top central banker has skirted around the central issue: trust. It's gone. And chucking more money at Wall Street began to look desperate many long months ago.

On Goldman Sachs reckonings, the cost of the 2008 credit crisis, or GFC (Global Financial Crisis) as is its moniker, is $US4.6 trillion, and counting.

It has even surpassed the aggregate cost of the Marshall Plan, the Louisiana Purchase, the Race to the Moon, the Savings and Loans crisis, the Korean War, the New Deal, the Invasion of Iraq, the Vietnam War and Nasa combined. And that's inflation adjusted.

The only event which even comes close in terms of cost, says Goldman, is World War II, which cost $US288 billion, or $US3.6 trillion in inflation-adjusted terms and that lasted three years and nine months (for the Americans at least).