One of my favorite outfits is Sprott Asset Management, located in Toronto Canada, because their analyses tend to be quite data-rich and “reality-based” as well.
In this excellent, short-and-sweet report, the case is made that a 3.5% boost to GDP from government stimulus spending alone will hit in the third quarter of 2009.
This means that whatever reading is turned in, you should mentally subtract 3.5% from it, because “growth” resulting from government deficit spending is not real growth at all, it is merely consumption borrowed from the future.
Are you stimulated yet? We hope you are, because we’ve just witnessed the largest economic stimulus in the history of the world. Never before have so many government dollars been thrown at the economy to prevent a depression. When added together, the combined financial, monetary and fiscal stimuli in the US are more than the cost of the two World Wars and “The New Deal” combined.
Stimulus spending worldwide has taken the form of a combination of tax cuts, transfer payments (free money) and infrastructure investments on roads, schools, railroads etc. In the US, the financial and stimulus contributions have been especially impressive in scale.
According to CNN’s bailout tracker, the various US government departments have committed to stimuli worth $11 trillion dollars and have issued cheques totaling $2.8 trillion dollars thus far in 2009.
Neil Barofsky, the Special Investigator General for the TARP program, has estimated that the total cost to the US taxpayer could be as high as $23 trillion.
by former_user