DealBook this morning drew attention to the finally-emerging numbers published by Bloomberg on the loans granted to Wall Street and others. Anyone paying attention has known for some time that the numbers are large, and now the size becomes even clearer. The numbers are even more interesting to read against the backdrop of Gretchen Morgenson’s NYT story on the Obama Administration and the NY Fed pressuring Eric Schneiderman to settle with the ultra-banks, and to stop investigating what happened.
The entire Boomberg article deserves a read – here’s the introduction:
"Wall Street Aristocracy Got $1.2 Trillion in Secret Fed Loans
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By Bradley Keoun and Phil Kuntz – Aug 22, 2011 7:19 AM CT
Citigroup Inc. (C) and Bank of America Corp. (BAC) were the reigning champions of finance in 2006 as home prices peaked, leading the 10 biggest U.S. banks and brokerage firms to their best year ever with $104 billion of profits.
By 2008, the housing market’s collapse forced those companies to take more than six times as much, $669 billion, in emergency loans from the U.S. Federal Reserve. The loans dwarfed the $160 billion in public bailouts the top 10 got from the U.S. Treasury, yet until now the full amounts have remained secret.
Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s unprecedented effort to keep the economy from plunging into depression included lending banks and other companies as much as $1.2 trillion of public money, about the same amount U.S. homeowners currently owe on 6.5 million delinquent and foreclosed mortgages. The largest borrower, Morgan Stanley (MS), got as much as $107.3 billion, while Citigroup took $99.5 billion and Bank of America $91.4 billion, according to a Bloomberg News compilation of data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, months of litigation and an act of Congress.
“These are all whopping numbers,” said Robert Litan, a former Justice Department official who in the 1990s served on a commission probing the causes of the savings and loan crisis. “You’re talking about the aristocracy of American finance going down the tubes without the federal money.”
(View the Bloomberg interactive graphic to chart the Fed’s financial bailout.)"
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