(Click the image to see the larger original.)

How do you react when you see some of the numbers that talk about how much various government bailouts will cost in the global recession that we’re surely heading into?

I tend to think of them as just numbers, big ones for sure, but hard to relate to.

So the US government is spending over $700 billion on bailing out the banking sector. Here in the UK, the government has earmarked a similar amount for rescue operations, among other things. Elsewhere in the EU, the talk is all about big numbers.

It’s not until you compare numbers like this in the context of other big-budget things that you get a better sense of scale. And, especially out of America, when you see all the numbers visually, you tend to go ‘Wow!’

The numbers breadcrumb trail: Mark Borkowki (where I saw it first) –> Voltage blog (who created the image above) –> Boing Boing (who has the raw numbers).