It is reasonably safe to predict the cost of rebuilding Christchurch is going to be vastly more than the initial $2 billion estimate which emerged about 12 hours after the earthquake struck.
It isn't clear how that was calculated as it is still too soon to accurately assess the extent of the damage to homes and businesses, let alone the devastated infrastructure.
Prime Minister John Key looked tired on television on Saturday night and that was with good reason. It had been a tough week for the Government without one of the worst natural disasters in the country's history.
And as Key walked through the rubble and spoke of the need to look after people affected by the catastrophe, figures must have been running through his mind.
Ruined roads, railway lines and bridges aren't covered by earthquake insurance and restoring them will be enormously costly. The loss to the economy while Christchurch recovers will affect the whole country and stretch the Government's finances even further.
Until Saturday morning, the worst of last week's woes had been the collapse of South Canterbury Finance (SCF) and the $1.6b bailout of its investors, along with a $175 million loan so it could pay its debts.
As a media event, that has been eclipsed by the earthquake but in political terms it isn't going to go away in a hurry.
Questions will be asked in Parliament this week by Labour MPs who think the Government needs to give some serious answers about how much it knew, and when.
To get this in perspective, that $1.6b isn't far short of the $2b estimate to repair the earthquake damage to Christchurch.
Taxpayers will foot the bill for the SCF bailout, as they will for much of the restoration of the city, and while none will begrudge money spent to rescue Christchurch that isn't the case with the SCF operation.
The Government doesn't like using the $1.6b figure, it prefers $600m, which is what it estimates will be the shortfall when SCF's assets have been sold or wound up. Because of the way it handled the company's collapse, it now effectively controls all those assets and will retrieve as much cash as it can.
It believes it can get back just over $1b, which might or might not turn out to be the case.
The bailout money came from the Retail Deposit Guarantee Scheme set up by the previous government in October 2008, with National's support.
In those dark days of international financial turmoil there wasn't an option because other countries were doing the same and without the scheme operating in New Zealand money would have poured out the country to safer destinations.
The explanation at the time made sense. The banking sector had to survive because without it the economy would crash and burn.
The banking sector did survive, much better than in most other countries, and New Zealand came through the recession in far better shape than others.
That crisis passed - so why, two years down the track, is the scheme's fund being used to repay more than 30,000 depositors in SCF? Because the Government didn't have a choice is the short answer. SCF was covered by the scheme, so it had to pay out.
What should be really irritating taxpayers is the way the system was being exploited, apparently well before Treasury started taking an interest in SCF about a year ago.
Sandy Maier, the chief executive put in to try to save it, revealed last week SCF started ramping up its high-risk property development loans after it came under the scheme. It knew its depositors' money was safe, so it started to fly high.
Much too high, it turned out, because it ended up with bad loans worth more than $500m. The money, said Maier, had just vanished.
But that didn't have to worry the investors who put their money into SCF because it offered interest at 8.5 percent, a significantly better return than they would have gained in safer institutions. They knew that if the worst came to the worst - and it did - they would get their money back with interest at 8.5 percent.
What makes this seem even worse are reports that the company's collapse could have been hastened by its most wealthy investors withdrawing funds so they didn't have more than $250,000 in it, which is the limit the guarantee scheme pays out on.
They had seen the writing on the wall and they made sure they weren't going to lose out.
It is now obvious there were flaws in the scheme when it was so hastily put together. Maybe Treasury, which designed it, knew there were flaws but believed the means justified the end. Not allowing finance companies into it would have seen funds emigrating from them as well as from the banks, but is annoying now to find out the extent to which it has been exploited.
A new scheme comes into force next month which will have much tighter criteria, rules which will avoid a repetition of last week's bailout of a company which Finance Minister Bill English bluntly said had "gone broke". But as he also said, most of the finance companies that were going to fall over, have fallen over.
Is the stable door being closed too late and should the Government and its Treasury experts have realised the need to act sooner? These are issues it will be called on to explain in the weeks ahead.
NZPA