CORRECTION: Erin Burnett on CNN says we gave the banks $250 billion.....

[MindMover]

We gave the banks $16,000 + Billion.....


According to the GAO audit, $16.1 trillion in secret loans were made by the Federal Reserve between December 1, 2007 and July 21, 2010. The following list of firms and the amount of money that they received was taken directly from page 131 of the GAO audit report....

Citigroup - $2.513 trillion
Morgan Stanley - $2.041 trillion
Merrill Lynch - $1.949 trillion
Bank of America - $1.344 trillion
Barclays PLC - $868 billion
Bear Sterns - $853 billion
Goldman Sachs - $814 billion
Royal Bank of Scotland - $541 billion
JP Morgan Chase - $391 billion
Deutsche Bank - $354 billion
UBS - $287 billion
Credit Suisse - $262 billion
Lehman Brothers - $183 billion
Bank of Scotland - $181 billion
BNP Paribas - $175 billion
Wells Fargo - $159 billion
Dexia - $159 billion
Wachovia - $142 billion
Dresdner Bank - $135 billion
Societe Generale - $124 billion
"All Other Borrowers" - $2.639 trillion

This report was made available to all the members of Congress, but most of them have been totally silent about it. One of the only members of Congress that has said something has been U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders.

The following is an excerpt from a statement about this audit that was taken from the official website of Senator Sanders....

"As a result of this audit, we now know that the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world"


http://www.forbes.com/sites/traceygreenstein/2011/09/20/the-feds-16-trillion-bailouts-under-reported/

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony. Gandhi

[Traveling_Home]

1. Did they pay this back?

I know we borrowed or printed a lot of this extra money to give to them. When they paid us back, what happened to the money?

[MindMover]

2. Hundreds of Billions has supposedly been paid back.....

as you well know, there is a difference between hundreds and thousands.....

paid back is like asking your wife to pay you back for the money she borrowed to wash your clothes,

not really money that we are dealing with, just numbers on balance sheets and ledgers...

and, Most of the reasons our politicians talk about austerity and banks do not lend is because of these unbelievable numbers.....

[freshwest]

5. That reminds me of that Onion piece:

U.S. Economy Grinds To Halt As Nation Realizes Money Just A Symbolic, Mutually Shared Illusion

February 16, 2010

WASHINGTON—The U.S. economy ceased to function this week after unexpected existential remarks by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke shocked Americans into realizing that money is, in fact, just a meaningless and intangible social construct...

"It's just an illusion," a wide-eyed Bernanke added as he removed bills from his wallet and slowly spread them out before him. "Just look at it: Meaningless pieces of paper with numbers printed on them. Worthless."

According to witnesses, Finance Committee members sat in thunderstruck silence for several moments until Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) finally shouted out, "Oh my God, he's right. It's all a mirage. All of it—the money, our whole economy—it's all a lie!"

It gets a lot better with a happy ending at the link here:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/us-economy-grinds-to-halt-as-nation-realizes-money,2912/

We had a piece here roundly criticized about some guy in the House of Lords. I asked Brits on another website about him and they said he was crazy but no one could stifle him because they are appointed for life.

They also thought this audit was bunk but I can't believe that Bernie Sanders is one of the men behind the curtain...

We don't ever seem to get a straight story on these things. And personally, when they start talking numbers like this I just feel like, well, it's just digits or perhaps it's all a shell game. IDK.

[freshwest]

3. Oh, well, what's a few trillion here or there or even over there...

[TreasonousBastard]

4. That's a lot of money, but...

it's OK if it's paid back. Most of it, at least.

One major function of the Fed is to keep the discount window open during a crisis, which is apparently what happened. The question is-- when does the number get so big it's insane and can never be paid back...

[freshwest]

6. See, now there you go: '...the discount window open during a crisis...'

Please tell me what that has to do with the wars, Social Security, treasury bills, the stock market and austerity?

Or even the deficit?

Because that means nothing to me and I suspect it means nothing to a lot of other people.

Window? What window?

Would someone please shut the barn door before all the horses get out?

I gotta go to sleep. See you later. See if you can dumb that down for me.

[TreasonousBastard]

8. I do that to confuse people who...

know absolutely nothing about a topic but insist on talking about it anyway.

Since you had the good sense to ask, the Fed lends money to banks through what is colloquially known as the "discount window". That's not the only way it lends money, but when a LOT of it is needed at one time, the window is often the best way. Just shovel it out.

Why would the Fed just shovel money out? Well, watch again that movie with Jimmy Stewart dealing with bank failure during the Depression and see just how bad it can be when Joe Public and the small businesses who depend on his buying stuff lose all their money when the bank runs out. Bad as it may be to shovel money out, the Depression was worse.

The first time that I know of when the Fed saved the world doing this was when the Penn Central railroad went bankrupt, thanks to a couple of dumb crooks, and a few hundred million in loans, bonds, bills, and other stuff went "poof." (A few hundred million causing all that trouble-- how quaint, but that was the 70's) Anyway, to stop banks from failing, Wall Street from crashing, and mass suicide, the Fed shoveled record amounts of money out. When they realized that it actually worked, they made a habit of it.

Now that we're dealing with trillions, nobody really wants to ask how much is too much or if and when it will stop working.

[MindMover]

9. I think we are past that point.....

and living in Oz......

[newfie11]

7. If all that had been given to everyone in America

I wonder what the economy would be today. People could have paid off mortgages, loans. Maybe a demand for more products thus creating more jobs.

Maybe that is to simple and my old mind does not comprehend.

[freshwest]

10. That's what I thought, too. Like give a course to each person who might not have planning skills and

Redistribute the wealth. A lot of this I guess is coming from the fact that there are around 9 billion people on Earth. And they are fighting over who owns what and currency or money, whatever, is a category representing real goods.

All these people, and how would they benefit from a one-time distribution? Would they squander it, continue to make wars with each other, steal from each other, still be fighting and killing and oppressing each other? Would the money change anything? Not that I would do those things if given a distribution, but what level of trust do we have?

I think part of the problem is that money is a social construct, that our financial system is built on trust, and we have people who disrespected that trust and decided to steal all they could. At this point, as always in history, it's theirs now and they'll kill anyone who tries to take it away from them, like all conquerors in history. Certainly Romney is of that ilk, in that he plundered and robbed whole communities and made himself so wealthy he believes he is now entitled to directly rule over us.

Although population may not be as much as issue, because we've always had disparities in less crowded eras. The human race has a lot of trouble regarding who gets to sit on what piece of real estate, as well. And you and I may not be realisitic about how societies are run. The human race has developed classes, possibly based on the supposition there may not be enough to support all of us or the conquest method.

So many humans have been and are kept in conditions I wouldn't keep a dog in, treated in ways no prisoner should ever be treated, and others get to live the life of ease and laugh at it.

There is a sense of peace in independent wealth, not beholden to whatever winds of change hit the political scene. We're seeing a collapse that was inevitable perhaps, based on available planetary resources, but I don't believe this had to happen. It's been out of balance a long time. We may not fairly call what happens a total collapse, because people like Romney, Greenspan, etc., live above the system we've worked all our lives to create to care for ourselves and our fellows.

Not that good an answer, just thoughts as to why a distribution of that may not work even if it was to come to pass. And this was a debt, wasn't it, too?

Our children or grandchildren will pay the bill for this in some form or fashion the way it is now. Perhaps this has always been the case, and the bill is not in dollars. It's in the kind of world and lives they will live. It's hard to see things outside the way we've been taught. I see no easy answers, but in getting older, I do wish to see more peace in the world.