Re: Phid & Abs
in response to
by
posted on
May 26, 2011 06:18PM
We may not make much money, but we sure have a lot of fun!
I guess everything but this is transparent in todays world, i just like to find out for myself. Rather be one of the ones that one day wakes up and says, "What happened"
I won't aergue with you bear, i get the feeling you don't ever like anything, so be it. I don't agree with much you have to say but don't squawk about it. Oh and that was Paulson from goldman sachs engineering all the bail out money and i am sure working on the fed loans because he had to give them trillions for our sake.
Fed Gave Banks Crisis Gains on Secretive Loans as Low as 0.01%
May 26, 2011, 12:35 AM EDT
By Bob Ivry
May 26 (Bloomberg) -- Credit Suisse Group AG, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc each borrowed at least $30 billion in 2008 from a Federal Reserve emergency lending program whose details weren’t revealed to shareholders, members of Congress or the public.
The $80 billion initiative, called single-tranche open- market operations, or ST OMO, made 28-day loans from March through December 2008, a period in which confidence in global credit markets collapsed after the Sept. 15 bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.
Units of 20 banks were required to bid at auctions for the cash. They paid interest rates as low as 0.01 percent that December, when the Fed’s main lending facility charged 0.5 percent.
"This was a pure subsidy," said Robert A. Eisenbeis, former head of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and now chief monetary economist at Sarasota, Florida-based Cumberland Advisors Inc. "The Fed hasn’t been forthcoming with disclosures overall. Why should this be any different?"
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which oversaw ST OMO, posted aggregate data about the program on its website after each auction, said Jeffrey V. Smith, a New York Fed spokesman. By increasing the availability of short-term financing when private lenders were under pressure, "this program helped alleviate strains in financial markets and support the flow of credit to U.S. households and businesses," he said.
Not in Dodd-Frank
Congress overlooked ST OMO when lawmakers required the central bank to publish its emergency lending data last year under the Dodd-Frank law.
"I wasn’t aware of this program until now," said U.S. Representative Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who chaired the House Financial Services Committee in 2008 and co- authored the legislation overhauling financial regulation. The law does require the Fed to release details of any open-market operations undertaken after July 2010, after a two-year lag.
Records of the 2008 lending, released in March under court orders, show how the central bank adapted an existing tool for adjusting the U.S. money supply into an emergency source of cash. Zurich-based Credit Suisse borrowed as much as $45 billion, according to bar graphs that appear on 27 of 29,000 pages the central bank provided to media organizations that sued the Fed Board of Governors for public disclosure.
New York-based Goldman Sachs’s borrowing peaked at about $30 billion, the records show, as did the program’s loans to RBS, based in Edinburgh. Deutsche Bank AG, Barclays Plc and UBS AG each borrowed at least $15 billion, according to the graphs, which reflect deals made by 12 of the 20 eligible banks during the last four months of 2008…