The Secret $7.77 Trillion Bailout

[blueduck37.livejournal.com]

Apologies if this story was posted here already; I couldn't find a post on it.

Now we've all heard the lie statement that the Tea Party began as a cultural backlash to a new President, who to conservatives was the face of a changing America that scared them protest and backlash to the 2008 TARP program even though no conservative protests occurred until early 2009.

So I assume they will join Occupy Wall St in demanding major changes to Wall St and our banking system after Bloomberg News' big story about a shadow bailout that was occurring, via the Federal Reserve. They gained this info through the invaluable Freedom of Information Act. As the article notes, "It dwarfed the Treasury Department’s better-known $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year."

The article discusses how this "secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger."

To me, the most anger-inducing facts are the lies and deception that surrounded this, from the Wall St. end. We learn that Wall St firms lied to investors (pretending to be healthy, while this was going on), as well as to Congress, who passed a weak reform bill with bad information.

For instance, we learn that-

Bankers didn’t disclose the extent of their borrowing. On Nov. 26, 2008, then-Bank of America (BAC) Corp. Chief Executive Officer Kenneth D. Lewis wrote to shareholders that he headed “one of the strongest and most stable major banks in the world.” He didn’t say that his Charlotte, North Carolina-based firm owed the central bank $86 billion that day.
....

JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon told shareholders in a March 26, 2010, letter that his bank used the Fed’s Term Auction Facility “at the request of the Federal Reserve to help motivate others to use the system.” He didn’t say that the New York-based bank’s total TAF borrowings were almost twice its cash holdings or that its peak borrowing of $48 billion on Feb. 26, 2009, came more than a year after the program’s creation.

And that-

New York-based Morgan Stanley (MS), took $107 billion in Fed loans in September 2008, enough to pay off one-tenth of the country’s delinquent mortgages. The firm’s peak borrowing occurred the same day Congress rejected the proposed TARP bill, triggering the biggest point drop ever in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. (INDU) The bill later passed, and Morgan Stanley got $10 billion of TARP funds, though Paulson said only “healthy institutions” were eligible.

Free market!

Multiple Senators are quoted as saying “We didn’t know the specifics," which is great for a democracy. It notes that having all of the information of what was really going on would have likely resulted in a different (stronger?) Wall St reform bill. As it is, it doesn't really fix anything. Too big to fail still exists, etc.

If news about a secret bailout and its surrounding deception doesn't spur any action for real change, nothing will. This is why many in the OWS movement feel the system is hopeless. And that's not good for democracy either.

[PS- Bloomberg News also has another great story about how, as Bush's Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson passed on insider info to his hedge fund friends.]

Comments

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

It bothers me, but honestly the whole way the bill was handled bothers me. If Obama had had the least political sense he would have nipped the Tea Party in the bud before it fairly got started as a reaction to his Health Care Bill. He thought it would blow over and that never works. Unfortunately the OWS movement is just an extension of everything wrong with the Tea Party...

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Oh, and the public sector also allows you to say no. It's called voting.

[kayjayuu.livejournal.com]

Any chance of explaining how he could have nipped the Tea Party in the bud?

And how is OWS an extension of the bad parts of the Tea Party?

I'm truly looking for information here. at your convenience.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

He could have reacted to those town hall meetings with an immediate demonstration of why his Health Care reform bill was not what they said it was. He could have easily tapped into a much wider range of support than he has now and done so sufficiently that the Town Hall Meetings wanting the government out of their Medicare would have been slapped in the face as a bunch of ignorant crybabies who don't know what they're talking about at the same time, the carrot and stick.

OWS has the same tendency to loudly spout inane, irrelevant slogans that sound superficially good to their wing of the ideological spectrum. It couples this with cutesy signs, association with nasty-not-nice people and like the Tea Party has an intellectual spasm a mile wide and a sixteenth an inch deep.

[kayjayuu.livejournal.com]

Overall I agree. I will point out, though, that part of Obama's personality is to distance himself from conflict so that he can't be blamed easily if things go awry. So "his" healthcare bill became the Democrat's bill and he stayed far far away from it until his pen hit the signature line.