I found this littl extract from an economist showing some facts of the markets since great depression.
"At last count, the Federal Reserve and the government have either lent, guaranteed or spent $12.8 trillion in their efforts to get the US economy back on track. We know that these numbers lose their significance after a while and it's hard to relate to them but we'll try.
You may remember a couple of years ago when a study was done by two respected economists estimating that the total cost of the Iraq war would eventually reach $2 trillion. At the time, people were shocked. But compared to the nearly $13 trillion for the economy, the Iraq war expenses now seem small in comparison.
Looking at it another way, the value of all the gold in existence since the time of Christ is currently worth about $2 trillion. In other words, just the costs to bail out the US economy and nothing else, like Social Security, military, infrastructure etc, is so far going to be more than six times all of the gold that's been produced over the past 2000 years. (Just last December the cost was three times, which illustrates how quickly the costs have multiplied over the past five months.)"
That is one very large number in the computer banking systems. I further read that if the Feds actually had to print the physical dollars takes to bail out the economy thus far it would take something like 19 months if they printed @ 1 million dollars a minute..... makes you think