US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson appears on TV as a trader works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange last night. Photo/ AP

US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson appears on TV as a trader works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange last night. Photo/ AP

Governments the world over have this year thrown billions of dollars into their economies in an attempt to stave off the worst of the global recession. Taxes have been cut, benefits increased, infrastructure projects fast-tracked.

Today's announcement of yet another rescue package by the US Government takes the total amount of taxpayer money committed by the administration into the trillions.

Here in New Zealand our Reserve Bank has aggressively cut official interest rates, but our governments - both the now-departed Labour administration and the new National team, have been slow to follow the big-hit stimulus path of other nations.

Here's a rundown of how the governments of the world are trying to stop their economies sliding over the edge:


NEW ZEALAND

The Government's December stimulus package will inject about $7 billion into the economy over two years, said Finance Minister Bill English today.

On the campaign trail, National outlined introducing tax cuts next April on top of the October tranche, bringing forward infrastructure spending and helping those hit by redundancies.


USA

It's here where it started and here where the real eye-watering money is being paid out. Buying equity in banks, cutting taxes, paying greater unemployment benefits, buying hundreds of billions of dollars worth of asset-backed loans - the Federal Government is digging deep.

The Bush administration has been rolling out stimulus packages pretty much since the start of 2008, each becoming more expensive as the world financial crisis itself becomes ever more widespread. It's been hard to keep track of exactly how much the US taxpayer will be hit up for, but it's well into the trillions (one trillion is a thousand billion)

In May this year, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said "the worst of the United States credit crisis may have passed." This was when the Bush administration and Congress had just enacted its US$168 billion ($217 billion) stimulus package of tax rebates for people and tax breaks for businesses - the first of many.

The Government also committed US$29 billion to help engineer the takeover in March of Bear Stearns by New York-based JPMorgan Chase & Co and US$122.8 billion in addition to Tarp allocations to bail out New York-based American International Group, once the world's largest insurer.