US ECONOMY LOST $6.9 TRILLION IN 2008
$8.4 TRILLION IN BAILOUTS PROMISED
2008 is over, and we have survived it. Though for some of us, just barely.
2008 saw the greatest financial losses in generations, as $6.9 trillion poured from investors' coffers in the worst series of cascading disasters since the Great Depression.
The resulting panic was met with equally drastic action by the US Treasury and Federal Reserve bank. As pillars of the US economy toppled, the Fed government created an additional $8.5 trillion in currency liquidity and began handing out massive, low interest loans in hopes of stopping a chain reaction of failures.
This massive economic bloodletting threatens to rival the United States' GDP: a now-seemingly hapless $14 trillion.
James Bianco, president of Chicago-based Bianco Research Inc., told the Toronto Globe and Mail: "No one understands these numbers, and I include the Treasury Secretary [Henry Paulson] and the chairman of the Federal Reserve [Ben Bernanke]."
Increasingly, in 2008 the US is being said to have suffered a "financial 9/11."
Many blame the Republican party, namely the Bush administration, for letting it go this far.
The crisis, which grew dramatically in scope with the toppling en masse of shaky mortgages, resulted in credit markets freezing and widespread layoffs. From Dec. 2007 to Nov. 2008, 2.7 million Americans lost their jobs, raising the total number of unemployed to 10.3 million (6.7 percent), according to the US Department of Labor's November report on unemployment.
