This is a little old, but for those of you keeping score at home, The Atlantic last month put out a great way to visualize what's going on with both the bailout and the Recovery. The graphic does an excellent job of showing how the bailout, while huge at some $787 billion, is almost puny compared to the trillions of dollars the Federal Reserve could be pumping into the system through asset purchases. It's always good to keep some perspective on the situation, and graphics like this help explain why we think it's important to make sure the Fed programs are held to the same transparency and accountability standards as the Recovery Act programs.

That said, our only gripe with this chart is the same problem we have with the asset purchases to begin with. If you notice, in the above paragraph I said "trillions of dollars the Federal Reserve could be pumping into the system." That's because the numbers we have, along with the numbers used in The Atlantic's chart, are only upper boundaries, or how much the Fed has been authorized to spend. It isn't clear how much money has actually been used under these programs, or what exactly this money is being used to buy, both of which would be good to know, considering we're talking about almost $5 trillion dollars.