$7.7 TRILLION??

Bloomberg News:

The U.S. government is prepared to provide more than $7.76 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers after guaranteeing $306 billion of Citigroup Inc. debt yesterday. The pledges, amounting to half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, are intended to rescue the financial system after the credit markets seized up 15 months ago.

The bailout includes a Fed program to buy as much as $2.4 trillion in short-term notes, called commercial paper, that companies use to pay bills, begun Oct. 27, and $1.4 trillion from the FDIC to guarantee bank-to-bank loans, started Oct. 14.

The money that’s been pledged is equivalent to $24,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. It’s nine times what the U.S. has spent so far on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Congressional Budget Office figures. It could pay off more than half the country’s mortgages.

So now we finally have the true estimated cost of the bailout, including Monday's bailout of Citigroup to the tune of $25 billion: a jaw-dropping $7.7 trillion dollars. That's seven-thousand seven-hundred billion dollars. That's one hell of a lot of zeros.

That's 137 times Bill Gates' net worth.

That's a stack of $100 bills 5,225 miles high.

7.7 trillion seconds ago is 243,997 years ago, the time of the emergence of Neanderthal Man.

$7.7 trillion is like giving $25,600 to every man, woman, and child in the America.

Or rather, that's how much every individual in the country in in hock for this bailout.