Just A Number

Having crunched what few details available, the NY Times has come up with $2.5 trillion for TARP II: This Time We're Serious the Financial Stability Plan (FSP). My favorite part?

Administration officials committed to flood the financial system with as much as $2.5 trillion — $350 billion of that coming from the bailout fund and the rest from private investors and the Federal Reserve, making use of its ability to print money.

So yeah, if you want to visualize the bailout, take the Uruk-Hai creation scenes from Isengard in The Two Towers, and then overlay the goofy factory music from Warner Bros. cartoons. Edit in big fat stacks of cash everywhere and the Monopoly guy in a hot tub.

It's pretty much like that. We're going to try to Weimar Republic our way out of this mess. You have no idea how bad it's going to be in just a few months.