What's the Real Size of the Financial Bailout Package ?

With the vulnerability owing to risky exposure exhibited by the financial institutions of United States, the contagion was waiting to happen. World over, central banks and respective governments have doled out bailout packages to contain their financial crises borne out of their exposure to US sub-prime Mortgages. The cumulative size of the bailout package of all global institutions threatens to dwarf the $700billion bailout package announced by the US recently.

The European countries had started announcing packages in an effort to save their financial institutions when the first wave of sub-prime US Mortgages had raised it's hood and threatened to sour the stock-market party early 2008. After the full blown blast in the US, the European governments are soon expected to announce more such instances of bailouts as the region comes to grips with the spread of the epidemic onto their shores.

The total size of bailouts in the US alone is supposed to be in the region of $990billion inclusive of the package plan passed by the Congress recently. In addition, the Irish government is supposed to have put in approximately $572billion as part of a guarantee for liabilities of it's banks.

The collective bailout packages from the US & European region could amount to approximately $1.8trillion ! This amount is many times the GDP of most advanced nations ! The world has not yet heard of the international exposure that the banks of Japan / China have had in the recent years. With the European bailout announcements expected to come in the near future, the collective fallout of this crisis could very well exceed $2 trillion!