Lunar Obverse

soupsoup:

Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks Undisclosed $13B

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.

As Wil says (from whom I got this post), this is outrageous. It gives me context for all the folks who complain about cities that choose to spend money on cops policing peaceful protests, or the “damage” to city parks caused by those protests. 

As we saw in Portland, the Occupiers can police themselves and there is no violence when the robotic stormtrooper riot cops don’t show up. But banks? Banks need policing, and our government is doing a piss-poor job of it.