Tuesday, August 23, 2011

The Federal Reserve Bailed Out Foreign Banks



The Masons have nothing over the Federal Reserve when it comes to secrecy. The leviathan does its best to keep its records closed. The Feds argument is that their transactions with other financial institutions could harm that banks reputation and stock prices. However, Bloomberg News was able to discover just how badly our banks were in trouble:

“Data gleaned from 29,346 pages of documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and from other Fed databases of more than 21,000 transactions make clear for the first time how deeply the world’s largest banks depended on the U.S. central bank to stave off cash shortfalls,” write Bloomberg News’s Bradley Keoun and Phil Kuntz.

The Federal Reserve didn’t just bailout our banks; they also bailed out over 30 foreign ones as well:

The Royal Bank of Scotland took $84.5 billion, the most of any foreign borrower, while Swiss bank UBS got $77.2 billion and Germany’s Hypo Real Estate Holding received $28.7 billion in loans. Belgium’s biggest bank, Dexia, and France’s Societe Generale also took in loans.

Of course, American firms also got in on the publicly funded loans.

The largest borrower was Morgan Stanley, which received as much as $107.3 billion, while Citigroup took $99.5 billion and Bank of America $91.4 billion. In comparison, TARP, a $700 billion bank bailout fund that was passed by Congress in late 2008, gave $45 billion each to Citigroup and Bank of America and only $10 billion to Morgan Stanley.

Of course the Federal Reserve claims that they didn’t lose any money:

The Federal Reserve claims that it has not lost money on these emergency loans and that, in fact, it has netted $13 billion in interest from these programs from August 2007 through December 2009.

My question is how are we to know that when they refuse to open their books?





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