Tracking the Fed's $1.2 trillion Wall Street bailout

Through Freedom of Information Act requests, netting some 29,000 pages of previously secret documents, Bloomberg has discovered the unprecedented and astounding scope of Federal Reserve action in staving off a depression during 2008's financial crisis, loaning $1.2 trillion, an amount "more than the total earnings of all federally insured banks in the U.S. for the decade through 2010."

Here's a snapshot from an interactive graphic they created tracking fed loans to banks.

Interestingly, that $1.2 trillion Bloomberg notes, is "about the same amount U.S. homeowners currently owe on 6.5 million delinquent and foreclosed mortgages," but it's the "Wall Street aristocracy," as Bloomberg labels them in a bit of welcome class warfare, that got the massive bailouts. More astonishing numbers:

The $1.2 trillion peak on Dec. 5, 2008—the combined outstanding balance under the seven programs tallied by Bloomberg—was almost three times the size of the U.S. federal budget deficit that year and more than the total earnings of all federally insured banks in the U.S. for the decade through 2010, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The balance was more than 25 times the Fed's pre-crisis lending peak of $46 billion on Sept. 12, 2001, the day after terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon. Denominated in $1 bills, the $1.2 trillion would fill 539 Olympic-size swimming pools.

What Atrios said: "Shouldn't we be drug testing all of these welfare recipients?"