This infographic by Information is Beautiful, shows some of the biggest expenditures in history. Off the bat readers can see that the "worst case" financial crisis cost to the US government would have been astronomical and that the actual cost of the financial crisis was only $2,800 billion (still not a small sum). We can also see that OPEC's Climate Change Fund is only a tiny fraction of its earnings just as Russie spends only a fraction of the amount the US spends on its defence. The Beijing Olympics cost almost nothing compared to the Iraq War, the biggest real expenditure on this infographic.