US Federal Reserve Data On Loans During Crisis Released

oDDmON oUT writes "Pursuant to a FOIA request, Bloomberg has acquired numbers from the Fed on loans made to banks and businesses during the financial crisis between 2007 and 2009. They also posted a direct link to the spreadsheets in zipped format and updated their data visualization of the lending."

Bullshit detector honks!

[Kludge]

Individuals often are wanting handouts, not loans.

Honk! bullshit! I'm an individual. I'd go for a no interest loan any time. Are you offering?

There is a lot of difference between a loan and a handout.

Honk! bullshit! The difference is in name only. They both save you money.

The only difference between the banks and individuals is that rich powerful people run the banks, so they got the freebie loans.

Re:Can someone please explain the outrage here?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Federal reserve banks are not-for-profit, quasi-government institutions. Any "profit" they generate (through fees, bonds, or interest) is transferred to the US Treasury department.

Re:prevented collapse?

[flatulus]

The magnitude of the losses would have been such that the FDIC fund would have been sucked dry in a heartbeat. Then it would be up to the U.S. Government to make up the shortfall, piling the new government debt on to the national debt pile. Haven't we been doing enough to "pile on" already?

Also, there's a lot of "interconnected-ness" in the banking industry. If one large bank fails, it will drag another handful with it. They will drag others with them, etc. Only "smallish" banks can fail and have the system absorb the impact without massive "domino effect" collapse. "Too big to fail" is a sobering thought...

Re:Freddie and Fannie losses much more...

[Anonymous Coward]

So why are they not going to jail? Suing an individual that isn't Bill Gates or other billionaire sounds pointless at best. This is how the system buries the problem: "Look what we did to those criminals" when the criminals that caused the issue in the first place was Congress, the SEC, Bill Clinton's administration and every president after him including the current clod in the White House.

Re:prevented collapse?

[Anonymous Coward]

you know what happened last time we had institutions that were "too big to fail"? We broke those institutions up. Of course, they didn't like it last time; so now they have paid off our government enough now to prevent such a repeat.

Re:misleading article

[Arker]

The thing is, the Constitution delegated to Congress the rights to "coin money" for a reason. They have interpreted that instead as a right to delegate the right to print currency, and delegated said right to the Federal Reserve so they dont have to waste time actually doing their jobs. And every time the Fed turns on the printing press, by diluting the pool of currency, it's the same effect as milling coins or flat-out counterfeiting really - it's a hidden, involuntary tax. We all pay the bill through inflation and reduction in value of our savings and retirement. That makes it the people's money just the same if it were revenue taxed openly.

Re:prevented collapse?

[frank_adrian314159]

"Too big to fail" is a sobering thought...

Which is why one iether does not let them get too big or restricts them so that they cannot engage in practices and businesses likely to make the fail. The fact that we spent the last twenty or so years removing these constraints were at the root of this particular downturn. The fact that this problem has not been addressed as a result is our shame.