TARP

To convey the significance of the Occupy Wall Street movement, NBC News anchor Brian Williams this week quoted the 1960s Buffalo Springfield song, For What It’s Worth:

“There is something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear.”

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We've just learned about the Federal Reserve's extraordinary secret bailout of the country's big banks. We now know that the TARP bailout program was only the tip of the iceberg, and that financial institutions received a total of $1.2 trillion in loans and other funds while the rest of the country was left to struggle for economic survival.

We also know that, despite all that "we got our money back" rhetoric, these loans represent a cash giveaway to the banks that totals up to tens of billions of dollars - while homeowners and student loan borrowers continue to struggle.

Here's what we now know about this secret bailout, thanks to a Bloomberg report, along with what we already knew - and what we still don't know:

We now know that the 10 biggest banks in America received $669 billion in emergency loans from the Fed.

We already knew that the same 10 banks now own 77% of the country's banking assets, more than before the crisis, making them even more "too big to fail" than ever. more »

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The other day we had an interesting discussion of that secret Fed bailout on Thom Hartmann's TV program, The Big Picture.  Here's the video. more »

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People in Wisconsin are pulling their money out of Marshall & Ilsley (M&I) Bank because they know it's been helping their Governor's crusade against public employees and the middle class.

They might also like to know that M&I's executives ran one of the most conspicuous dumping sites for toxic financial waste in the country. And that the same executives are about to get very rich, even though TARP rules supposedly don't allow big bonuses for underwater bankers like the leadership at M&I.

These executives didn't just contribute to Scott Walker's campaign. They also helped the governor avoid the press - and his own constituents - by letting him use their bank's underground tunnel, which leads directly from its parking lot into the Capitol Building in Madison. Using it for this purpose may have been a violation of the bank's own Code of Business Ethics. [See UPDATE below]

That tunnel's not just a convenient way to help a political crony. It's also one heck of a metaphor. more »

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Mike Stark has posted a provocative on-the-street interview with Barney Frank about the recently released Fed data. Frank offers what is now a standard defense of the Fed's bailout operations: Without them, the economy would have collapsed, so critics should just quit whining. more »

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The data from the Federal Reserve audit is full of frightening revelations about U.S. economic policy and those who implement it. When Wall Street went off the rails in the fall of 2008, policymakers told the public we had a certain kind of problem, knowing all along that the actual nature of the problem was very different—and far more severe. This was a terribly destructive lie. more »

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The Republican Party's newfound political assault on Ben Bernanke is a grim reminder of the actual conservative economic agenda for the next two years. The midterm elections taught Republicans a destructive lesson: With Democrats in power, the worse the economy gets, the better Republicans do at the voting booth. more »

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Economic policy has faced grave challenges over the past two years, hamstrung by obstructionist Republicans in the U.S. Senate and Wall Street-friendly advisers in the Obama administration. With the Republican Party now in control of the House, it seems certain that any major action to create jobs will face tremendous obstacles. This is a global calamity. more »

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It's been pretty well-documented that the ultimate fate of Wall Street reform will depend on a series of highly technical proceedings at federal regulatory agencies. If regulators adopt tough new rules, the financial overhaul could succeed well beyond the expectations of optimistic reformers. more »

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Today’s absurd William Cohan column actually argues that we don’t need consumer protections in banking—nevermind the subprime explosion, the $8 trillion dollar housing bubble or the 1.2 million foreclosures expected this year. more »

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