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Say It With Pictures

Sometimes it's hard to truly grasp the meaning of big numbers. That's why it's helpful to use graphics:

$22 Trillion Here, $22 Trillion There

The GAO was tasked with studying the impact of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law to help determine what it's economic impact would be. So what did they find?

The 2008 financial crisis cost the U.S. economy more than $22 trillion, a study by the Government Accountability Office published Thursday said. The financial reform law that aims to prevent another crisis, by contrast, will cost a fraction of that...

The report, five years after the collapse of mortgage-focused hedge funds in late-2007 set off a yearlong banking panic and a deep recession, was published as part of a cost-benefit analysis of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law of 2010. The GAO tried to determine if the benefits of preventing a future economic meltdown exceeded the costs of implementing that law.

"If the cost of a future crisis is expected to be in the trillions of dollars, then the act likely would need to reduce the probability of a future financial crisis by only a small percent for its expected benefit to equal the act’s expected cost," the GAO concluded.

Obviously the banksters disagree.