Should a trillion dollars be enough? How about three or more, depending on how you look at the bailouts being thrown around?

Mint.com and WallStats.com have some stunning visual expressions of what a Trillion Dollars represents.

One trillion dollars; it’s a number that few people can
comprehend, let alone your standard nine digit calculator. There have been attempts to put this number into perspective before. A trillion dollar bills laid end to end would reach the sun or you spend a dollar per second for 32,000 years or one trillion dollars in pennies would weigh as much as 2,755,778 Argentinosauruses (the largest known dinosaur).

EJ is absolutely brilliant! Reprinting in full here…

As Paul Volcker pointed out over the weekend, the global financial system has disintegrated and no one has any idea how to fix it. Lots of good ideas about how to fix the banking system, but as weve explained, even if any of these things are done — and we are not holding our breath — its the endogenous credit system thats the real problem, the one that used to magically allow consumers to lend new money into existence by taking out a car loan or charging dinner on their Visa card, the one that depended on the now defunct securitized debt market.

Most reasonably aware North Americans have, like me, watched this mess develop for over 20 years. Credit was substituted for savings. Two incomes were substituted for one. Other peoples savings were substituted for our own.

These past 20 years have been like a long bus ride into the middle of a desert without food or water, with the driver all along telling us that, no, we are not heading into a desert but traveling along a long stretch of beach that leads to an ocean with palm trees and swimming pools, we just cant see the water yet.

All along the way the skeptics look out the window and say, “Were going the wrong way,” and, “Shouldnt we turn around or at least stop to pick up drinking water in case youre wrong?”

“Stop being so negative,” yells the driver over his shoulder. “You dont understand neo-classical geography.”

Meanwhile, the rest of the passengers in the bus sit watching Survivor on portable DVD players or reading about Britney Spearss hairstylist in The National Enquirer.

One day the bus runs out of gas. The driver gets out, looks around and says, “How about that. Here we are in the middle of the desert without food or water. Who could have known?”

He pulls out a cell phone and shortly a helicopter rescues him and his friends, leaving everyone else behind to fend for themselves.

The End

Postscript: Our leaders have driven our economy to the place economies eventually wind up that run on credit, discourage savings, and sold off productive capacity needed to generate new savings. Our readers have not listened to them but have saved their own food and water, metaphorically speaking, by staying out of debt and increasing their savings, even if this was not what everyone else was doing. Good for you. On the other hand, readers who are expecting a Mad Max world need to get a grip and re-read Are You a Doomer? Law abiding citizens do not turn into criminals overnight. Your town will not be run by warlords. There will be no wandering hoards of looters or ox-drawn Rolls Royces. Thats Y2K stuff. Try to keep it in perspective, folks. Everything is going to get really, really slow for a while.

via What just happened? – iTulip.com.

Sharon Astyk’s called 2008 pretty well and, with a couple of quibbles, I agree with her 2009 predictions. Sadly.

I think that she might be underestimating a few things:

• The ability of the US government to pull rabbits out of the hat. When you control the money presses and regulate the financial markets, you can do quite a bit. For a while longer.
• The interest of foreign governments in keeping us afloat until they can untangle themselves from dollar investments.
• The ability of banks and industry to manipulate government policy to their liking in the name of “crisis”.
• The “new coach” mentality changing consumer sentiment. How long Obama has before people lose hope is the big question here.

The WSJ hits the Bush/Obama bailout mentality hard in their editorial “Barack Obama-san.” Politics aside, it’s a sobering review of what has happened to the Japansese economy after real estate and stock market bubbles burst and the government responded with multiple bailouts.

Here’s the chart that compares Japansese and US government debt as percentages of their respective GDPs:

This is a troubling reminder. Not a road to go down, right?

But we’ve already gone down that road. And I’m not talking about AIG or TARP.

You see, this editorial focuses on government debt. But the total national debt that includes individuals and businesses has already bloated!

A recent Morgan Stanley presentation highlights the spike of total debt in the US (on slide 6). Since the turn of the century alone, it has spiked from roughly 250% to 300% of GDP!

The lesson to be learned is more than the ineffectivity of public stimulus, which the WSJ rightly highlights. It is that, regardless of the source or destination of largess, its tantilizing short term benefits are dwarfed by its subtle, long term poison.

Just like binge eating, the pounds remain after the pleasure, and make it that much harder to cut back in the future.

Two things I ask of you;
  deny them not to me before I die:
Remove far from me falsehood and lying;
  give me neither poverty nor riches;
  feed me with the food that is needful for me,
lest I be full and deny you
  and say, “Who is the LORD?”
or lest I be poor and steal
  and profane the name of my God.

– Proverbs 30:7-9

http://www.commodityonline.com/news/Revolution-food-riots-in-America-by-2012-13062-3-1.html

The man who predicted the 1987 stock market crash and the fall of the Soviet Union is now forecasting revolution in America, food riots and tax rebellions – all within four years, while cautioning that putting food on the table will be a more pressing concern than buying Christmas gifts by 2012.
Gerald Celente, the CEO of Trends Research Institute, is renowned for his accuracy in predicting future world and economic events, which will send a chill down your spine considering what he told Fox News this week.