Financial Crisis Tab Already In The Trillions and Counting

Given the speed at which the federal government is throwing money at the financial crisis, the average taxpayer, never mind member of Congress, might not be faulted for losing track.

CNBC, however, has been paying very close attention and keeping a running tally of actual spending as well as the commitments involved. And there's been quite a jump since we last tabulated things two weeks ago.

Try $7.36 trillion dollars. That's more than double what was spent on WW II, if adjusted for inflation, based on our computations from a variety of estimates and sources.

Not only is it an astronomical amount of money, it's a complicated cocktail of budgeted dollars, actual spending, guarantees, loans, swaps and other market mechanisms by the Federal Reserve, the Treasury and other offices of government taken over roughly the last year, based on government data and news releases. Strictly speaking, not every cent is a direct result of what's called the financial crisis, but they're all arguably related to it.

The bulk of the sum falls under the Federal Reserve's umbrella, while another good chunk ($700 billion) is the under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) as defined under the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, signed into law in early October. (The TARP alone is bigger than virtually any other US government endeavor dating back to the Louisiana Purchase. See slideshow.)

The total figure is a combination of what's been committed (where it is defined) and what has actually been spent or lent (where a given program has started. )

So, for example, we counted the full $800 billion committed Tuesday in the form of measures directed at supporting consumer loan and mortgage-backed securities, even though none has yet been allocated. We counted the full TARP, even though only $320 billion has been spoken for.

Financial Crisis Balance Sheet

Government Entity	Amount Allocated in Millions of Dollars	Spent/Lent In Millions of Dollars
Federal Reserve:
(TAF) Term Auction Credit (allocated)	900000	415302
Discount Window Lending		139256
Banks (other loans primary credit)		92645
Investment Banks (other loans Primary dealer and other broker-dealer credit)		46611
Loans to buy ABCP (other loans Asset-backed commercial paper money market mutual fund liquidity facility)		661923
AIG (allocated minus Treasury 40B)	112500	87397
Bear Stearns (initial loan to JPMorgan)	29500	26919
(TSLF) Term Securities Lending Facility	225000	200524
Swap Lines (other federal reserve assets)		601963
(MMIFF) Money Market Investor Funding Facility (allocated)	540000
(CPFF) Commercial Paper Funding Facility *upper limit from Reuters	1800000	270879
(TALF) Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility	200000	200000
GSE MBS NO NAME Program	600000	600000
Treasury:
(TARP) Treasury Asset Relief Program	700000	330000
Exchange Stabilization Fund to guarantee principal in money market mutual funds	50000
Treasury direct purchases of MBS since Sept.	26570
Citigroup (Treasury+FDIC guarantees)	238500
FDIC:
Guarantees for Banks	1900000
Other:
Automakers	25000
(FHA) Federal Housing Administration	300000
Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac	350000
TOTAL	7361917

Note: Figures as of Nov. 28, 2008

But we're using specific numbers where available. Some $900 billion, for instance, has been allocated to the Term Auction Credit Facility, known as TAF. Another $1.8 trillion has been set aside for the commercial paper funding facility.

Individual firms such as Bear Stearns, AIG and Citigroup, to name a few, have also received billions of dollars in government aid, in some cases through a variety of means.

(Editor's Note: CNBC's Steve Liesman and Sabrina Korber have been keeping a running tally of the government's efforts, while Sean Entwistle, Yolaiki Gonzalez, Giovanny Moreano and Ariel Nelson researched and computed the data for the comparisons with other major historical events in the slideshow.)

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