Fed lent banks nearly $8 trillion during crisis

Fed lent banks nearly $8 trillion during crisis, report shows

While the nation's largest banks were publicly reassuring nervous investors of their stability during the height of the financial crisis, they were also quietly approaching the Federal Reserve, hat in hand. The total price tag: $7.77 trillion, many times the amount of the better-known TARP bailout.

The magnitude of the government's assistance to struggling banks allowed them to grow even bigger and continue paying executives billions in compensation, a report in Bloomberg Markets January issue said Monday.

A win in court against a group representing the banks and a FOIA request filed by Bloomberg LP revealed the extent of the central bank's largesse — as well as the $13 billion in profits banks earned from those bailouts. The so called "big six" — JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — accounted for $4.8 billion of that total — nearly a quarter of their net income during that time.

Those borrowed trillions were a deeply-buried secret. It appears that even high-ranking Fed officials didn't know about the scale of the handouts. According to Bloomberg, then-president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Gary H. Stern “wasn’t aware of the magnitude,” and unnamed sources say that even top aides to Treasury Department head Henry Paulson were kept in the dark.

The six biggest banks in the country received a total $160 billion in TARP funds, but as much as $460 billion from the Fed, raising the question as to how and why this nearly $8 trillion in loans, guarantees and limits remained under wraps for so long. According to the Fed, the massive scale of banks' borrowing — and the red ink that prompted it — had to be kept secret to avoid spooking investors and prompting a panic or bank runs that would have had even more devastating consequences on the shaken economy.

The Fed defended its actions back then by contending that the biggest financial institutions in the country were too big to fail — a phrase that has become a bone of contention among lawmakers, some of whom argue that a "too big to fail" bank is one that's too big to exist.

Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown sponsored a bill last year that would cap a bank's non-deposit liabilities at 2% of gross domestic product, and crack down on workarounds banks currently use to bypass a 1994 law that prohibits any one bank from holding more than 10 percent of all deposits in the country.



This report is truly DISGUSTING- I am a retired Invesment Banker - & not proud of it !!!