Hi cat,
Well, the meanings of words matters and commitments means something different from stimulus. A form of protection or shield, such as a guarantee, is something different to a loan which is more of a spear, and adding them together as Bloomberg has done is pretty weird, in my view. One of the two (ie the loan) is a financial event in which money is exchanged. The other is a contingency against an event which, absent the event actually occurring, costs pretty much nothing.
TARP involved actual money. And TARP, after all, is mostly recovered at this point.
The US government's multi-trillion dollar guarantees have not crystallised thus far and I don't see anyone claiming they are likely to, if they have not already expired. The fact the US offered guarantees which have not crystallised thus far means that no money has been printed and therefore that this protective governmental shield has not transformed itself into any kind of US debt. So while the guarantee reduced risk, I don't think it is quite proper to treat it as an expense.
An uncrystallised government guarantee is perhaps more analagous to a very cheap form of insurance. We don't count the earthquakes unless the rock actually moves.
So if we are talking about actual stimulus, which I would define as actual net government expenditures, the outlay was, I believe, less than $1tn.
All economics demands a financial system. We all saw what happened after Lehmann. I don't hear many folks who still believe we should have let the market destroy everything. The government's intervention to save Wall Street from itself was a great success. What they have failed to do, in my view, is to reform the financial industry sufficiently - although the good news is that the highest risks are now borne by hedge funds, and these may be allowed to fail.
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