All about the photos

[andrewducker]

Taking inflation into account:

and

Cheers to sarahs_muse for both.

Comments

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

Is -1% job losses a 1% jobs rise, or is that graph poorly labelled?

[andrewducker]

Badly labelled.

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what the first one is meant to show. That the bailout is expensive? Who didn't know that?

[andrewducker]

Not just expensive, but more expensive than the bailouts from the 30s and 86-91, the plan to rebuild Europe after WW2, putting a man on the moon, and three wars. All put together.

You may think it costs a lot to bail out your local chemists, but that's just peanuts compared to...

[drplokta]

Well, not necessarily, as most of the money for the bailout is expected to be repaid with interest. The same applies to the Marshall Plan, but not to the other items of comparison.

[andrewducker]

True - but there's a big question over whether that's a reasonable expectation. At the very least it looks like quantitative easing is going to be necessary to print our way out of this one.

[drplokta]

Yes, but quantitative easing costs nothing, not even paper and printing costs since they won't literally be printing more bills.

[andrewducker]

Except that the money being repaid is worth less than the money that was paid in the first place.

And that you're discouraging savers.

I mean, _I'll_ be happy, as my mortgage will be costing me less, but my bank manager will be somewhat less so.

[sigmonster.livejournal.com]

Compares outright capital costs on the right to contingent guarantees on the left - the capital element of the bailout is $700 billion so far, not the $4 trillion and change quoted at the link. And that capital is secured against investments which will, however crappy, have some net value. (Come to think of it, the S&L crisis involved a lot of contingent guarantees, iirc including a major expansion of FDIC coverage; have those been added, or is that element of the pie chart the net outlay some time after the end of the crisis? No idea, source doesn't say).

Also it's ignoring the great big fucking elephant of deficit spending, WWII; the US budget deficit peaked in 1943 at 30% of GDP. That would be about $4 trillion today, for a single year. I wonder why they left it out?

I really want to see what deflator they're using, it'll make an enormous difference over time.

But other than my intolerance of under-annotated and uninformative images, these are dandy!

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but so what? As others have said I'm not sure what is meaningful about that. It's just an unsourced chart from a libertarian who is opposed to all Government spending.

[andrewducker]

Well, I find meaning in knowing that it's costing more than recovering from previous recessions/depressions (bearing in mind that comparing them is difficult, situations change, etc.). If you don't then that's fine.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

It costs more in inflation adjusted money, but is that a very useful way of doing a comparison or is it far too much of a simplification?

Would % of GDP be a better comparison for instance?

I have a strong suspicion that the information presented in your post is correct but extremely misleading.

[matgb]

IAWTC.

The second graph is very useful, although again it's a different type of crisis to a normal recession so direct comparisons don't necessarily apply.

[andrewducker]

Head over to http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/ for a discussion of this graph and similar...