The US Federal Reserve headed off a depression by “providing as much as US$1.2 trillion in public money to banks and other companies” between August 2007 and April 2010. In secret. That’s what Bloomberg is reporting with a shocking data visualization based on information it received as a result of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
That makes the official US$160 billion in public bailouts of the banks look like chump change. That US$1.2 trillion? It’s about the same amount of outstanding bad mortgages in the US. A surprising amount went to European banks; the Royal Bank of Scotland scored US$84.5 billion and UBS US$77.2 billion.
Bloomberg goes on to provide guided explorations into the data: The US Fed financed Barclay’s buy of Lehman’s assets to the tune of US$40 billion; US industrial companies fed at the Fed trough as well; of course all the usual suspects cashed in; and one German bank received loans averaging US$21 million per employee.
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