Debt Financing in the Domestic Financial Sector: One Hundred Twelfth Congress, First Session, August 3, 2011

Too many people in Washington seem to have forgotten about the debt that helped put us in this deep recession and cost our country and almost everyone in it so much, and that is the debt of the financial sector. CBO estimates the entire cost of rescuing our failing banking system—the bailouts, decreased tax revenues, new spending programs in response to the trouble economy, and interest payments—will cost our Nation some $8.6 trillion, meaning 8 thousand billion dollars. That is more than 57 percent of our GDP. We cannot allow collective amnesia to obscure the role that excessive financial service debt played in causing the deepest recession since the Great Depression, and that really is the purpose of this hearing.