“During the financial crisis,
Congress bailed out the big banks with hundreds of billions of dollars
in taxpayer money; and that’s a lot of money.
But the biggest money for the biggest banks was never voted on by Congress. Instead, between 2007 and 2009, the Fed provided over $13 trillion in emergency lending to just a handful of large financial institutions. That’s nearly 20 times the amount authorized in the TARP bailout.
“Now, let’s be clear, those
Fed loans were a bailout too. Nearly all the money went to
too-big-to-fail institutions. For example, in one emergency lending
program, the Fed put out $9 trillion and over two-thirds of the money
went to just three institutions: Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Merrill
Lynch.
“Those loans were made
available at rock bottom interest rates – in many cases under 1 percent.
And the loans could be continuously rolled over so they were
effectively available for an average of about two years.”
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