Saturday, December 3, 2011

External article: The $16 trillion bailout to US banks you never heard of (more than all the US GDP!)

I admittedly changed the title of this article of major general interest by and at Global Research. Originally it is titled: Have You Heard About The 16 Trillion Dollar Bailout The Federal Reserve Handed To The Too Big To Fail Banks?, but it was too long and unappealing for my taste. What it denounces however is most important news you may have never heard of:

What you are about to read should absolutely astound you.  During the last financial crisis, the Federal Reserve secretly conducted the biggest bailout in the history of the world, and the Fed fought in court for several years to keep it a secret.  Do you remember the TARP bailout?  The American people were absolutely outraged that the federal government spent 700 billion dollars bailing out the "too big to fail" banks.  Well, that bailout was pocket change compared to what the Federal Reserve did.  As you will see documented below, the Federal Reserve actually handed more than 16 trillion dollars in nearly interest-free money to the "too big to fail" banks between 2007 and 2010.  So have you heard about this on the nightly news?  Probably not.  Lately Bloomberg has been reporting on some of this, but even they are not giving people the whole picture.  The American people need to be told about this 16 trillion dollar bailout, because it is a perfect example of why the Federal Reserve needs to be shut down.  The Federal Reserve has been actively picking "winners" and "losers" in the financial system, and it turns out that the "friends" of the Fed always get bailed out and always end up among the "winners".  This is not how a free market system is supposed to work.

According to the limited GAO audit of the Federal Reserve that was mandated by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the grand total of all the secret bailouts conducted by the Federal Reserve during the last financial crisis comes to a whopping $16.1 trillion.

That is an astonishing amount of money.

Keep in mind that the GDP of the United States for the entire year of 2010 was only 14.58 trillion dollars.

... continue reading

2 comments:

  1. It was absolutely sneaky, but neither the federal reserve loans nor the TARP bailouts ended up costing the American taxpayer anythying in the end because they were all repaid with interest.

    The automobile industry bailouts (particularly Chrysler), and the bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (government chartered, privately owned wholesale mortgage financing companies) account for almost all of the losses experienced by members of the General Public.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I should put a disclaimer maybe but I've read somewhere that the figure reported here is not properly accounted for: that loan extensions were counted as new loans, what is not correct at all.

    What do you think?

    ReplyDelete

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