andrewducker: (Experience)
andrewducker ([personal profile] andrewducker) wrote2009-02-12 08:25 am

All about the photos

Taking inflation into account:

and

Cheers to sarahs_muse for both.

[identity profile] cangetmad.livejournal.com 2009-02-12 08:35 am (UTC)(link)
Is -1% job losses a 1% jobs rise, or is that graph poorly labelled?

[identity profile] ninebelow.livejournal.com 2009-02-12 08:55 am (UTC)(link)
I'm not sure what the first one is meant to show. That the bailout is expensive? Who didn't know that?
drplokta: (Default)

[personal profile] drplokta 2009-02-12 10:06 am (UTC)(link)
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.
drplokta: (Default)

[personal profile] drplokta 2009-02-12 10:12 am (UTC)(link)
Yes, but quantitative easing costs nothing, not even paper and printing costs since they won't literally be printing more bills.

[identity profile] sigmonster.livejournal.com 2009-02-12 10:32 am (UTC)(link)
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!

[identity profile] ninebelow.livejournal.com 2009-02-12 11:38 am (UTC)(link)
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.

[identity profile] robhu.livejournal.com 2009-02-12 12:25 pm (UTC)(link)
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: Artwork of 19th century upper class anarchist, text: MatGB (Default)

[personal profile] matgb 2009-02-12 03:40 pm (UTC)(link)
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.