Bloomberg is reporting in their January issue the details of bailout loans made by the Bush administration to damn near every major US bank. The Fed made $1.2 TRILLION available for troubled banks and most of them took the money.
The hell of it is:
1. All this was done in secret. Bloomberg finally obtained thousands of documents that reveal the bailout and the scheme to keep it all secret.
2. The banks who took these loans made billions in profits -- all of which they kept.
3. And now the same banks are lobbying hard against federal regulations of the activities that caused them to need bailouts in the first place.
I'm not smart enough to condense the long Bloomberg article into a few pithy comments -- here are the first three paragraphs -- read the full article at this link.
The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.
The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.
Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.
Oh, wait a minute -- did I say something about $1.2 TRILLION in available loans? HOW ABOUT $7.7 TRILLION !?!?!?!?!?
The amount of money the central bank parceled out was surprising even to Gary H. Stern, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 1985 to 2009, who says he “wasn’t aware of the magnitude.” It dwarfed the Treasury Department’s better-known $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.
“TARP at least had some strings attached,” says Brad Miller, a North Carolina Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, referring to the program’s executive-pay ceiling. “With the Fed programs, there was nothing.”
Bankers didn’t disclose the extent of their borrowing. On Nov. 26, 2008, then-Bank of America (BAC) Corp. Chief Executive Officer Kenneth D. Lewis wrote to shareholders that he headed “one of the strongest and most stable major banks in the world.” He didn’t say that his Charlotte, North Carolina-based firm owed the central bank $86 billion that day.
Is it now time to go armed when we occupy Wall Street?