By Bradley Keoun and Phil Kuntz – Aug 21, 2011 7:01 PM ET
The Federal Reserve provided as much as $1.2 tillion in public money to banks and other companies from August 2007 through April 2010 to head off a depression. Source: Bloomberg
Aug. 21 (Bloomberg) — Robert E. Litan, a former Justice Department official who in the 1990s served on a commission probing the causes of the savings and loan crisis, now vice president at the Kansas City, Missouri-based Kauffman Foundation, Richard Herring, a finance professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Roger Lister, a former Fed economist who’s now head of financial-institutions coverage at credit-rating firm DBRS Inc., and Kenneth Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and now an economics professor at Harvard University, talk about the U.S. government’s $1.2 trillion bailout of the banking system and the outlook for regulatory overhaul of the industry. (Source: Bloomberg)
Morgan Stanley, along with Citigroup Inc., and Bank of America Corp., were the biggest borrowers under seven Fed emergency-lending programs. The three banks’ combined $298.2 billion in hidden Fed loans was triple what they received in publicly disclosed bailouts from the U.S. Treasury. Photographer: Peter Foley/Bloomberg
Bank of America Corp., along with Morgan Stanley and Citigroup Inc. was one of the biggest borrowers under the U.S. Federal Reserve‘s emergency-lending programs. The three banks’ combined $298.2 billion in hidden Fed loans was triple what they received in publicly disclosed bailouts from the U.S. Treasury. Photographer: Jeremy Bales/Bloomberg
Citigroup Inc., along with Morgan Stanley and Citigroup Inc., were the biggest borrowers under seven U.S. Federal Reserve emergency-lending programs. The three banks’ combined $298.2 billion in hidden Fed loans was triple what they received in publicly disclosed bailouts from the U.S. Treasury. Photographer: Jin Lee/Bloomberg
The Royal Bank of Scotland took $84.5 billion in loans from the U.S. Federal Reserve’s emergency-lending programs. Photographer: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg
UBS AG, Switzerland’s biggest bank, got $77.2 billion in loans from the U.S. Federal Reserve’s emergency-lending programs. Photographer: Gianluca Colla/Bloomberg
Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the fifth-biggest U.S. bank by assets. Photographer: Scott Eells/Bloomberg
U.S. Federal Reserve borrowings by Societe Generale SA, France’s second-biggest bank, peaked at $17.4 billion in May 2008, four months after the Paris-based lender announced a record 4.9 billion-euro ($7.2 billion) loss on unauthorizedstock-index futures bets by former trader Jerome Kerviel. Photographer: Judith White/Bloomberg
U.S. Federal Reserve borrowings by Societe Generale SA, France’s second-biggest bank, peaked at $17.4 billion in May 2008, four months after the Paris-based lender announced a record 4.9 billion-euro ($7.2 billion) loss on unauthorized stock-index futures bets by former trader Jerome Kerviel. Photographer: Antoine Antoniol/Bloomberg
Two weeks after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.‘s bankruptcy triggered a global credit crisis, Morgan Stanley countered concerns that it might be next to go by announcing it had ‘strong capital and liquidity positions.’ Photographer: Jeremy Bales/Bloomberg
Chief executive officers from eight of the largest U.S. banks receiving government aid testify at a House Financial Services Committee hearing in Washington, D.C on Feb. 11, 2009. Photographer: Brendan Smialowski/Bloomberg
The biggest borrowers under seven Fed emergency-lending programs were Morgan Stanley, Citigroup Inc., and Bank of America Corp.The three banks’ combined $298.2 billion in hidden Fed loans was triple what they received in publicly disclosed bailouts from the U.S. Treasury. Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
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.”
Foreign Borrowers
It wasn’t just American finance. Almost half of the Fed’s top 30 borrowers, measured by peak balances, were European firms. They included Edinburgh-based Royal Bank of Scotland Plc, which took $84.5 billion, the most of any non-U.S. lender, and Zurich-based UBS AG (UBSN), which got $77.2 billion. Germany’s Hypo Real Estate Holding AG borrowed $28.7 billion, an average of $21 million for each of its 1,366 employees.
Read more from the original source at: http://www.bloomberg.com
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