None of us had any real doubt that the Fed had been funneling money to Banksters even before TARP in the closing days of the Bush regime, during which he and his Republican cronies trashed the economy. How much it actually was and where it actually went is obscene. Had that money gone to main street, it could have been used to pay off every loan Banksters foreclosed after they killed the housing market. I’m not suggesting that, but just want to give you an idea of the scale involved here.
Citigroup Inc. (C) and Bank of America Corp. (BAC) were the reigning champions of finance in 2006 as home prices peaked, leading the 10 biggest U.S. banks and brokerage firms to their best year ever with $104 billion of profits.
By 2008, the housing market’s collapse forced those companies to take more than six times as much, $669 billion, in emergency loans from the U.S. Federal Reserve. The loans dwarfed the $160 billion in public bailouts the top 10 got from the U.S. Treasury, yet until now the full amounts have remained secret.
Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s unprecedented effort to keep the economy from plunging into depression included lending banks and other companies as much as $1.2 trillion of public money, about the same amount U.S. homeowners currently owe on 6.5 million delinquent and foreclosed mortgages. The largest borrower, Morgan Stanley (MS), got as much as $107.3 billion, while Citigroup took $99.5 billion and Bank of America $91.4 billion, according to a Bloomberg News compilation of data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, months of litigation and an act of Congress.
“These are all whopping numbers,” said Robert Litan, a former Justice Department official who in the 1990s served on a commission probing the causes of the savings and loan crisis. “You’re talking about the aristocracy of American finance going down the tubes without the federal money.”
(View the Bloomberg interactive graphic to chart the Fed’s financial bailout.)
Foreign Borrowers
It wasn’t just American finance. Almost half of the Fed’s top 30 borrowers, measured by peak balances, were European firms. They included Edinburgh-based Royal Bank of Scotland Plc, which took $84.5 billion, the most of any non-U.S. lender, and Zurich-based UBS AG (UBSN), which got $77.2 billion. Germany’s Hypo Real Estate Holding AG borrowed $28.7 billion, an average of $21 million for each of its 1,366 employees… [emphasis added]
Inserted from <Bloomberg>
I strongly urge you to read the rest of this article. I gave you only a small part of it. Also, try playing with the interactive graphic noted above.
What is critical to understand here is that, by the time Obama took office in 2009, the Bush regime had already funneled so much into the TBTF banks that Obama had no choice except to complete the process, lest Bankster default collapsed the Fed as well. Therefore, Republican attempts to blame Obama for their own crisis are pure bull.
Under water homeowners, should have an opportunity to refinance, devaluing the loans to market levels, but Republicans refuse to allow help for Main Street.
The Republican solution is to deregulate the Banksters. Frankly, these corporate criminals need to be so tightly regulated that even the eagles on their quarters are constipated. This will not happen unless Democrats, excluding DINOs, have strong majority in the House and a super-majority in the Senate.
17 Responses to “$1.2 Trillion More Bankster Bailout”
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Agreed. We need much more regulation on these corporate thievs, not less.
Thanks!
Frankly all of them including Bernanke, Bush , Cheney and every banker who imploded the world economy need to be in jail for fraud perpetrated on the American tax payer who will never recover what was stolen by the banks and subsidiary companies like the S&P, Moody’s and the rest.
Amen!
According to Bernie Sanders “the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world”. 16 trillion! More than our total debt, and loaned to many foreign institutions, without our knowledge or consent.
Jerry, you are correct. I actually dug into the GAO report and double checked Bernie’s numbers. Bernie and Bloomberg must be measuring different things.
Yikes! That was more depressing than visiting Red State or Freeperville.
Wasn’t it?!!?
Is anyone paying it back? Honestly they should have let BOA slide into the ocean. They’re the ones that started this crap.
Some are, but I don’t have the details.
Words fail me, but my blood pressure is up. Yeah, I saw this yesterday on Bloomberg — funny, didn’t hear a peep on the evening news shows about this. Great material for MSNBC and CurrentTV. Maybe if they make enough noise, the MSM will pick it up.
That’s why I covered it here, Ann.
BUT… don’t help the homeowners who were broke and with their mortgages underwater, because that would be… SOCIALISM!! BUT.. not letting the CAPITALISM market self correct, as the market rules all remember, “Whatever the market will bear” so isn’t it SOCIALISM bailing out all of these banks, even FOREIGN BANKS? 👿
Nicolai, I have long said that we have socialism for the rich only, while the poor and middle classes are stuck with free enterprise.
P.S. One more thing; isn’t giving already wealthy banks hundreds of billions of dollars basically making our currency WORTHLESS especially when these corporations are not putting it back into the economy? 🙁
Yes.