The Fed’s Been Propping Up Europe At America’s Expense

Wall street may be celebrating the economic news but Main street won’t be as this news collapses treasuries and the dollar even further.

From The Washington Post:

The financial crisis stretched even farther across the economy than many had realized, as new disclosures show the Federal Reserve rushed trillions of dollars in emergency aid not just to Wall Street but also to motorcycle makers, telecom firms and foreign-owned banks in 2008 and 2009.

The Fed’s efforts to prop up the financial sector reached across a broad spectrum of the economy, benefiting stalwarts of American industry including General Electric and Caterpillar and household-name companies such as Verizon, Harley-Davidson and Toyota. The central bank’s aid programs also supported U.S. subsidiaries of banks based in East Asia, Europe and Canada while rescuing money-market mutual funds held by millions of Americans.

The biggest users of the Fed lending programs were some of the world’s largest banks, including Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Swiss-based UBS and Britain’s Barclays, according to more than 21,000 loan records released Wednesday under new financial regulatory legislation.

The data reveal banks turning to the Fed for help almost daily in the fall of 2008 as the central bank lowered lending standards and extended relief to all kinds of institutions it had never assisted before.

Not a surprise except in the scope of what the Fed was doing. Harley-Davidson? Really? And how much money are we talking?

Well, foreign banks alone got at least $330 billion that the Fed printed out of thin air:

Foreign banks were among the biggest beneficiaries of the $3,300bn in emergency credit provided by the Federal Reserve during the crisis, according to new data on the extraordinary efforts of the US authorities to save the global financial system.

The revelation of the scale of overseas lenders’ borrowing underlines the global nature of the turmoil and the crucial role of the Fed as the lender of last resort for the world’s banking sector.

However, news that banks such as Barclays of the UK, Switzerland’s UBS and Dexia of Belgium borrowed billions of dollars at favourable terms from US authorities may further anger critics already enraged about the Fed’s rescue of Wall Street.

“We’re talking about huge sums of money going to bail out large foreign banks,” said Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont. “Has the Federal Reserve of the United States become the central bank of the world?”

Under the Dodd-Frank financial reform act, the Fed on Wednesday detailed more than 21,000 transactions with banks carried out through half a dozen special financing programmes starting in 2007. They include the Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF) for overnight funding of investment banks and the Term Auction Facility (TAF) for one- to three-month loans.

Barclays was the biggest cumulative borrower from TAF. The UK bank, which bought the US operations of Lehman Brothers out of bankruptcy in September 2008, borrowed a cumulative $232bn from the TAF through various subsidiaries.

Bank of Scotland and RBS of the UK, Société Générale of France, Dresdner Bank and Bayerische Landesbank of Germany, and Dexia of Belgium were all among the top 10 cumulative users of TAF. At any given time, these borrowers owed less than the total amount because the short-term loans were extended after they expired.

So America lost money  on this deal, that’s nice. It should be noted that Bernie Sanders is a Socialist and even he is nervous about this Keynesianism on steroids. The Barclay’s revelation is most troubling because it reveals that the Fed basically paid for Lehman Brothers to be “rescued” with tax dollars given to a foreign bank that will not pay us all our money back.

How does this stabilize our economy?

And we don’t even know the half of it. The Fed is still withholding information that is probably even more shocking:

The Federal Reserve withheld details on individual securities pledged as collateral by recipients of $885 billion in central bank loans, denying taxpayers a measure of the risks they faced from its emergency aid.

The central bank yesterday released data on 21,000 transactions from $3.3 trillion in emergency lending to stem the financial crisis. July’s Dodd-Frank law required the Fed to disclose the names of borrowers, the size and interest rates of loans, and “information identifying the types and amounts of collateral pledged or assets transferred.”

For three of the Fed’s six emergency facilities, the central bank released information on groups of collateral it accepted by asset type and rating, without specifying individual securities. Among them was the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, created in March 2008 to provide loans to brokers as Bear Stearns Cos. collapsed.

“This is a half-step,” said former Atlanta Fed research director Robert Eisenbeis, chief monetary economist at Cumberland Advisors Inc. in Sarasota, Florida. “If you were going to audit the facilities, then would this enable you to do an audit? The answer is ‘No,’ you would have to go in and look at the individual amounts of collateral and how it was broken down to do that. And that is the spirit of what the requirements were in Dodd-Frank.”

Fed spokeswoman Susan Stawick in Washington declined to comment.

There isn’t much to say. The Fed is looting American wealth to prop up a global financial system that is run by people who want to collapse America and create a new financial world order. This is  not just bad business, it’s treason.

But more importantly it’s madness that will lead to a further loss of wealth for America when we need to be figuring out ways to produce it. The dollar is collapsing and with it so is your quality of life but don’t worry, European banks and Harley-Davidson are still solvent.