Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Worse Than We Thought

I knew the bailout of big banks was a stupid thing to do.  But now we find out that the Fed wasn't just bailing out U.S. banks.  From the December 1, 2010 Financial Times:

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 rest of the article details how much a number of foreign banks borrowed from the Fed--including $232 billion that Barclays borrowed.
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2 comments:

  1. RobinDecember 1, 2010 at 5:18 PM

    Sadly I can't read the article because I'm not registered with FT.

    But just your excerpt is infuriating.

    This explains why Treasury has been stonewalling on FOIA requests on this.

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  2. Allen CogbillDecember 2, 2010 at 9:57 AM

    It may well get much worse. If Portugal, Belgium, and Spain need bailouts, the Germans probably will say "nein", in which case the Federal Reserve, through the IMF, will probably provide a large part of the bailout monies. Of course, as nearly as I can tell, the Fed doesn't have the money, so it will simply print it.

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