Continuing evidence that a plutocratic oligarchy has taken over the US government
TYD passes along a link to this Bloomberg report by Bob Ivry, Bradley Keoun and Phil Kuntz:
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.
A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.
‘Change Their Votes’
“When you see the dollars the banks got, it’s hard to make the case these were successful institutions,” says Sherrod Brown, a Democratic Senator from Ohio who in 2010 introduced an unsuccessful bill to limit bank size. “This is an issue that can unite the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. There are lawmakers in both parties who would change their votes now.”
The size of the bailout came to light after . . .
UPDATE: I hope you read the entire report: it’s somewhat long and totally shocking. And what’s weird is that none of the newspapers I read seems to even note the story: a bailout bigger than TARP, done in secret with no authorization from Congress and without informing the American people, and we think that’s okay now? Business as usual? I guess it is. We’re now moving into the harvest stage of the American experiment, I guess, in which the plutocrats will milk it for all they can until the inevitable riots, disruption, and revolt: it’s a very old pattern.
UPDATE 2: The more I read this story, the more it seems that Ben Bernanke found a way to ship $13 billion in taxpayer money directly to banks to beef up their bottom line. The banks got the money for free: in effect, simply given to them.
My question: Could I not have be given just a lousy half-million? So long as they’re simply giving money away.
It just amazes/galls/appalls me that 7.77 trillion was loaned to banks at 0.01% interest which banks turned around and loaned back to the gov’t through treasury bonds at 3% interest. Hence the 13 billion dollar gift (or as they call it, profit). No wonder they were passing out bonuses throughout the “crisis”. And for once congress is not to blame as they too were kept in the dark even as they passed TARP (which was a magnitude smaller than this bail out).
TYD
3 December 2011 at 7:34 am
The complete lack of coverage shows the degree of control the industry now has, I think.
LeisureGuy
3 December 2011 at 7:51 am
[Michael]: ” We’re now moving into the harvest stage of the American experiment, I guess, in which the plutocrats will milk it for all they can until the inevitable riots, disruption, and revolt: it’s a very old pattern.”
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Indeed it is. Spent the day on Google+ watching one shocking video after another of police abuse, some of it reported by local media. With the privatization of criminal justice and politics, every crazier redistricting, only ONE former policeman (Boston Chief) daring to challenge his thug colleagues throughout the land, it’s no wonder I’m a certified hermit. I suppose the 1% (for lack of any other description) believes they’ll come out on top no matter what happens. They will enjoy many layers of protection from their own private security, their walled communities, their local police force who folks like Mike Bloomberg consider their “own private army,” their legislators they paid for, their endless lawyers and judges in the pocket, the Army itself, Congress, their lackeys on the Supreme Court, and so on.
But don’t forget the reason “the revolution” isn’t being reported/televised: all news is corporate news now. Even if a network like NBC shows up, they cowardly report the story from the balcony their hotel room! Interviewing real people is just too much trouble.
zaine_ridling
4 December 2011 at 12:37 am