Word: trillions
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...government spending has to take up the slack and keep at it. In Japan, a recovery was aborted in the late 1990s when, at the first sight of green shoots, the government raised taxes. President Barack Obama is committed to reducing this year's federal budget deficit of $1.3 trillion by half in four years. That's a laudable goal - as long as private-sector demand has picked up by then...
...cough up. Same goes for those who work in the business. Many have lost their job and life savings, and most have seen their salary cut. Yes, there have been egregious bonuses and golden parachutes - and we ought to claw them back - but that won't pay for a trillion-dollar (or more) bailout. Which leaves ... the folks who loaned the banks money. The banks' creditors have been the clearest beneficiaries of the bailouts - leaving them with the most wherewithal to contribute. (See 25 people to blame for the financial crisis...
...these creditors? The biggest group, with outstanding loans of about $9 trillion, is depositors like you and me. When you deposit money, you're lending it to the bank. Those deposits were explicitly insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) up to $100,000 before the crisis, and the banks paid for that insurance (though not in full, given that FDIC coverage has been raised to $250,000 and seems effectively without limit at bigger banks) and passed the cost on in the form of lower interest rates than on, say, an uninsured money-market account. That, plus...
...banks also borrow on wholesale markets, mainly by issuing bonds. About $2.6 trillion of bank funding in the U.S., 20% of the total, comes from such debt securities, according to the FDIC. At the most troubled of the big banks, Citigroup, the figure is 27%. (Citi's domestic depositors account for just 16% - its main deposit base is overseas.) These bank bonds are mostly in the hands of large, sophisticated institutional investors - pension funds, insurance companies, mutual funds. It may be too much to ask small depositors to monitor the risks at the banks where they put their money...
...trillion budget might make sense if these were normal times, with a newly elected, very liberal Administration wanting to focus on reshaping America and redistributing wealth. However, these are not normal times. We are in the midst of the worst economic challenge in 80 years. (See pictures of the down-and-out economy...