What The Fed Didn't Want Us to Know-And Why We Need to Know It

From Bloomberg, yesterday:

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. . .

The size of the bailout came to light after Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News, won a court case against the Fed and a group of the biggest U.S. banks called Clearing House Association LLC to force lending details into the open.

The Fed, headed by Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, argued that revealing borrower details would create a stigma -- investors and counterparties would shun firms that used the central bank as lender of last resort -- and that needy institutions would be reluctant to borrow in the next crisis. Clearing House Association fought Bloomberg’s lawsuit up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the banks’ appeal in March 2011.

$7.77 Trillion

The amount of money the central bank parceled out was surprising even to Gary H. Stern, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 1985 to 2009, who says he“wasn’t aware of the magnitude.” It dwarfed the Treasury Department’s better-known $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.

Translation:

The criminal banking cartel who controls the Federal Reserve and who has bought our corrupt government, pretty much from top to bottom, fought like a lioness, all the way to the Supreme Court, to protect its secrets--that it committed half the entire country for a year to bail out a handful of huge foreign-controlled banks and keep them from facing bankruptcy when the magnitude of fraud they perpetrated on investors threatened to come to light.  It wasn't just TARP.  It was trillions of dollars of free money lent to the banks to shore up their balance sheets so they could continue to rape and pillage our economy without consequence. 


If you read on through the article, you'll see more, like this:  Following this enormous gift, courtesy of you and I, the American taxpayer, the criminals went on to earn $13 Billion in profits, and still manage to pay their employees fully twice as much as the average worker in the U.S.  After being understood as 'too big to fail,' so as to have a perpetual gun to the heads of every person on the planet, who can't let them go bankrupt without setting the world economy on fire, the six biggest criminal firms in the criminal banking enterprise GREW by almost 40%.   We took away their derringer and gave them a 9mm to hold to our heads.

The point?   It's this:

The only political action that matters right now in the United States is to dismantle this Mafioso banking cartel and break the stranglehold that it has on our government and us.  Everything else, liberal or conservative, amounts to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.