trillion

The U.S. government is now willing to spend more than $7 trillion to help rescue the economy. That's about $23,000 for every American, and more than half of U.S. annual gross domestic product.

Worst case, Steve Wallach figures it costs $10,000 to buy a blade server that can execute 50 billion floating point operations in a second.

By that measure, it would take $200,000 to buy 20 of the blades, to handle a trillion operations a second in a heavy-duty scientific or financial calculation.

AIG may have gotten a $150 billion deal Monday, but that's just a small fraction of the nearly $3 trillion in financial rescue programs the government has created to stabilize the U.S. economy.

International lending by banks fell by $1.1 trillion in the second quarter, the largest contraction since 2001, offical figures show.

Skepticism of the Bush administration's financial bailout plan, which would put the total bailout cost at around $1.8 trillion, is growing, and crossing normal ideological lines.

Gartner is projecting that worldwide IT spending till top $3.4 trillion in 2008, up 8 percent from a year ago.

That’s the good news. The bad: Much of that growth is based on the decline of the U.S. dollar, which helps American technology vendors.

Make no mistake: The worst probably is not over for financial firms. Not by a long shot.

The next US president is expected to face a record budget deficit of nearly half a trillion dollars in 2009.

They own or guarantee $5 trillion worth of mortgages? - nearly half of all the country's outstanding home loan debt - and they're crashing.

But not everybody is convinced they should be.

As the Iraq war continues with no clear end in sight, the cost to taxpayers may balloon to $2.7 trillion by the time the conflict comes to an end, according to Congressional testimony.