Tuesday, June 30, 2009

A History of Bailouts

Reading about the legacy of Reagan, I was surprised by the size if the Savings & Loan bailout: Dallek places the amount at $500 billion. I decided to look into the number. Wikipedia, my first source, claims the bailout involved $125 billion in government assistance. Delving deeper, Propublica has a fantastic History of U.S. Government Bailouts. Propublica states that, adjusted to inflation, S&L Bailout cost $293.3 Billion (in 2008 US dollars).

1 comment:

Pete Abbate said...

Likely not at all relevant but I don't feel like putting it in a separate posts. Are Republicans purposefully incompetent? According to Thomas Frank in the Wall Street Journal, you bet they are!

Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that which the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant. ~Fredrich Hayek in The Constitution of Liberty