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Wednesday, December 21, 2011 - 12:22pmSanction this postReply
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Here is a link to the actual audit.

An email going around pointed me to this blog entry:
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Audit of the Federal Reserve Reveals $16 Trillion in Secret Bailouts
unelected.org

The first ever GAO(Government Accountability Office) audit of the Federal Reserve was carried out in the past few months due to the Ron Paul, Alan Grayson Amendment to the Dodd-Frank bill, which passed last year. Jim DeMint, a Republican Senator, and Bernie Sanders, an independent Senator, led the charge for a Federal Reserve audit in the Senate, but watered down the original language of the house bill(HR1207), so that a complete audit would not be carried out. Ben Bernanke(pictured to the right), Alan Greenspan, and various other bankers vehemently opposed the audit and lied to Congress about the effects an audit would have on markets. Nevertheless, the results of the first audit in the Federal Reserve’s nearly 100 year history were posted on Senator Sander’s webpage earlier this morning.

What was revealed in the audit was startling:

$16,000,000,000,000.00 had been secretly given out to US banks and corporations and foreign banks everywhere from France to Scotland . From the period between December 2007 and June 2010, the Federal Reserve had secretly bailed out many of the world’s banks, corporations, and governments. The Federal Reserve likes to refer to these secret bailouts as an all-inclusive loan program, but virtually none of the money has been returned and it was loaned out at 0% interest. Why the Federal Reserve had never been public about this or even informed the United States Congress about the $16 trillion dollar bailout is obvious - the American public would have been outraged to find out that the Federal Reserve bailed out foreign banks while Americans were struggling to find jobs.

To place $16 trillion into perspective, remember that GDP of the United States is only $14.12 trillion. The entire national debt of the United States government spanning its 200+ year history is "only" $14.5 trillion. The budget that is being debated so heavily in Congress and the Senate is "only" $3.5 trillion. Take all of the outrage and debate over the $1.5 trillion deficit into consideration, and swallow this Red pill: There was no debate about whether $16,000,000,000,000 would be given to failing banks and failing corporations around the world.

In late 2008, the TARP Bailout bill was passed and loans of $800 billion were given to failing banks and companies. That was a blatant lie considering the fact that Goldman Sachs alone received 814 billion dollars. As is turns out, the Federal Reserve donated $2.5 trillion to Citigroup, while Morgan Stanley received $2.04 trillion. The Royal Bank of Scotland and Deutsche Bank, a German bank, split about a trillion and numerous other banks received hefty chunks of the $16 trillion.

"This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you’re-on-your-own individualism for everyone else." - Bernie Sanders (I-VT)

When you have conservative Republican stalwarts like Jim DeMint(R-SC) and Ron Paul(R-TX) as well as self identified Democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders all fighting against the Federal Reserve, you know that it is no longer an issue of Right versus Left. When you have every single member of the Republican Party in Congress and progressive Congressmen like Dennis Kucinich sponsoring a bill to audit the Federal Reserve, you realize that the Federal Reserve is an entity onto itself, which has no oversight and no accountability.

Americans should be swelled with anger and outrage at the abysmal state of affairs when an unelected group of bankers can create money out of thin air and give it out to megabanks and supercorporations like Halloween candy. If the Federal Reserve and the bankers who control it believe that they can continue to devalue the savings of Americans and continue to destroy the US economy, they will have to face the realization that their trillion dollar printing presses will eventually plunder the world economy.

The list of institutions that received the most money from the Federal Reserve can be found on page 131 of the GAO Audit and are as follows..

Citigroup: $2.5 trillion ($2,500,000,000,000)
Morgan Stanley: $2.04 trillion ($2,040,000,000,000)
Merrill Lynch: $1.949 trillion ($1,949,000,000,000)
Bank of America : $1.344 trillion ($1,344,000,000,000)
Barclays PLC (United Kingdom ): $868 billion ($868,000,000,000)
Bear Sterns: $853 billion ($853,000,000,000)
Goldman Sachs: $814 billion ($814,000,000,000)
Royal Bank of Scotland (UK): $541 billion ($541,000,000,000)
JP Morgan Chase: $391 billion ($391,000,000,000)
Deutsche Bank (Germany ): $354 billion ($354,000,000,000)
UBS (Switzerland ): $287 billion ($287,000,000,000)
Credit Suisse (Switzerland ): $262 billion ($262,000,000,000)
Lehman Brothers: $183 billion ($183,000,000,000)
Bank of Scotland (United Kingdom ): $181 billion ($181,000,000,000)
BNP Paribas (France): $175 billion ($175,000,000,000)
and many many more including banks in Belgium of all places

View the 266-page GAO audit of the Federal Reserve(July 21st, 2011): http://www.scribd.com/doc/60553686/GAO-Fed-Investigation

Source: http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-11-696
FULL PDF on GAO server: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d11696.pdf

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That list of institutions is far from complete. Others receiving large funds included Countrywide, AIG, and GE. The cronyism and conflicts of interest are so blatant - and it makes me sick that this came out in July and didn't occupy the main-stream media's headlines for at least a month.


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Wednesday, December 21, 2011 - 2:35pmSanction this postReply
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I'm simply at a loss for words...what a way for a government body to betray their own people.

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Wednesday, December 21, 2011 - 2:55pmSanction this postReply
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Alan Greenspan is slime.

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Wednesday, December 21, 2011 - 4:47pmSanction this postReply
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I've forwarded this as an e-mail to my personal correspondents.

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Thursday, December 22, 2011 - 8:11amSanction this postReply
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The GAO report was published in July. If what was reported was so alarming, then why has there been so little in the news and internet discussion about it since then?

I plan to read some more of the report later. Wow, 266 pages! For now I offer the following. I suspect that what the www.unelected.org website says about the GAO report, especially about the size of the loans to banks, is very misleading. Note the numbers they report from page 131 of the GAO report. The amounts shown are of transactions over 2.5+ years, and 88% of them were PDCF for the top three. The 4th page of the report shows PDCF is an acronym for Primary Dealer Credit Facility and the loans it makes "provide overnight cash loans to primary dealers against eligible collateral."

Interbank lending has been a big part of banking for decades, especially for overnight loans between banks for them to manage their liquidity and satisfy regulations such as reserve requirements. Banks carry less liquid assets, e.g. loans and mortgages, which can't be used to meet reserve requirements. So they borrow and pledge them as collateral.

Clearly during the crisis banks were wary of lending to one another this way because they didn't know enough about what a potential counter-party had in nonliquid assets to pledge as collateral. The Fed stepped in to compensate.

Moreover, I suspect the numbers are misleading. Suppose the Fed lent a bank $100 million one day, the bank got its liquidity up a couple days later, and the loan was canceled. Suppose the next week the Fed lent the same bank $150 million in the same kind of scenario. It's true that the Fed lent the bank $250 million, but it is a misleading half-truth. In this particular example, the bank has $0 in outstanding loans to the Fed afterwards. I suspect that many of those loans to the big banks were often "rolled over" and that part of them are still outstanding. But how much and will they be repaid are the most important questions.

I looked at Citibank's year-end balance sheets 2007-10. Short-term debt was less than $0.4 trillion on each. That by itself suggests the $2.5 trillion lent to Citibank is/was not an outstanding loan balance.

(Edited by Merlin Jetton on 12/22, 11:11am)


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Thursday, December 22, 2011 - 9:18amSanction this postReply
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Well I feel dumb lol ty for the clarification.

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Thursday, December 22, 2011 - 4:04pmSanction this postReply
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Merlin,

My brother is a mortgage banker, with a fair amount of bank operations background. His response was similar to yours. He said that we was curious as to how much is outstanding, and how did they collect those numbers (are they accumulations of short-term loans that have been rolled-over again and again?)

I told him that I didn't know enough, and hadn't studied the document enough to make very intelligent comments. But that I was concerned to see some of those crony names pop up (like Countrywide, B of A, AIG, Goldman Sachs, GE, etc.) That makes it look to much like a hidden, moral hazard available to an insider group.

An amount of money as large as that total would have had to stay dormant in the banks reserve accounts to avoid triggering massive inflation - at least that is my guess. Unless the inflation is held down by very high demand for money from the bulk of the economies (in which case we are in for a veritable fire storm of inflation later.)

But I'm happy to what I can to expose the Fed and fuel the fires towards getting the government out of the money/credit business.

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Friday, December 23, 2011 - 5:45amSanction this postReply
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Steve, thanks for giving some confirmation to what I wrote. The Fed certainly warrants criticism. However, I think any criticism should be based on facts, not gross misrepresentations. If it isn't, readers more sympathetic to the Fed will wholly dismiss the criticism as views of the ignorant and/or crackpots.

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Friday, December 23, 2011 - 5:04pmSanction this postReply
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This is a follow-up to post 4 about the numbers the www.unelected.org webpage takes from Table 8 of the GAO report. The following is what appears immediately before Table 8, starting on the previous page.
For example, an overnight PDCF loan of $10 billion that was renewed daily at the same level for 30 business days would result in an aggregate amount borrowed of $300 billion although the institution, in effect, borrowed only $10 billion over 30 days.
Also, Table 9 of the GAO report, which eliminates the redundant counting, shows total loans of only $1.14 trillion, versus Table 8's $16.1 trillion. The article ignores Table 9.

The article says Goldman Sachs received $814 billion and nothing about any of it being repaid or eliminated w/o default. The $814 billion is shown in Table 8 of the GAO report, with $589 billion of it as PCDF. However, Table 9 shows only $20 billion total for Goldman Sachs, with $2 billion of it as PCDF outstanding as of 7/21/2010.

(Edited by Merlin Jetton on 12/24, 6:07am)


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