In an e-mail linking to a Bloomberg story headlined “Secret Fed Loans Helped Banks Net $13B,” Slog tipper mr. herriman says, “holy crap.”

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.

There’s an interactive chart, along with much more, over at Bloomberg. Holy crap, indeed.

14 replies on “Banks Got (Secretly) Bailed Out”

  5. @1 It wasn’t some magic choice betwixt doing nothing at all or secretly loaning the banks trillions of dollars at ridiculously low interest rates with no strings attached. What was done was what was best for the banks, and clearly not the rest of us.

    @3 YUP.

  6. If you’re a banker and you get trillions in secret loans, make billions in profits off those loans, and then successfully stop any new regulations aimed at reigning in your business so it doesn’t need future bailouts, are you really going to be afraid of a couple thousand Occupiers standing out in the rain? These guys are masters of the universe and they’re laughing at us.

  8. They could all save themselves a lot of trouble and deliver printing presses from the U.S. Mint to bank headquarters. The results would be about the same.

  9. @1 – Gawrsh, if Glass-Steagal hadn’t been repealed by Clinton Corp. then perhaps the banks wouldn’t have become too big to fail… they merged from 37 to 4 banking entities to nearly corner the market.

    How is this a good thing? Too much instability and risky exposure.

    Better to have many smaller banks, so that when a few fail we get a warning and can take action before catastrophe strikes. When there are only 5-7 players, if one goes down everyone else suffers, obviously.

    So let’s recap:

    Iran/Afghanistan wars – a billion+ a year.
    Wall Street Bailout – $8 TRILLION in two years.

    So all that taxpayer money went into two illegal invasions and OCCUPATIONS. And also into Wall Street portfolios.

    Great.

    Fucking break them up into smaller units. Seperate banking and investment houses. Don’t let it happen again. This is the second fucking time. They can’t be trusted. Obviously.

    How was that not clear the first time?

  10. @6, 7 – Actually, I’m fairly sure they’re worried. Between the Arab Spring, the fact that 750,000 Europeans joined the Int’l Day of Action a month ago, and given that this movement is THIS distributed. Well yeah, this is kinda new. It poses some strange and unexpectable problems for them.

    Occupy has already gotten the issue on the agenda, a very significant acheivment considering the position everyone is in. The class warfare the rich have been waging against us for the last 3 decades (“Greed is Good!”) has gotten us against the ropes. But we have some new nimble tools to work with.

    Advantage: People.

  13. @11, while you’re not wrong, you aren’t right either. Perhaps your time would be better spent dreaming up new conspiracy theories about the World Trade Center.

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