Meet The 35 Foreign Banks That Got Bailed Out By The Fed (And This Is Just The CPFF Banks)

One may be forgiven to believe that via its FX liquidity swap lines the Fed only bailed out foreign Central Banks, which in turn took the money and funded their own banks.

It turns out that is only half the story: we now know the Fed also acted in a secondary bail out capacity, providing over $350 billion in short term funding exclusively to 35 foreign banks, of which the biggest beneficiaries were UBS, Dexia and BNP.

Since the funding provided was in the form of ultra-short maturity commercial paper it was essentially equivalent to cash funding. In other words, between October 27, 2008 and August 6, 2009, the Fed spent $350 billion in taxpayer funds to save 35 foreign banks. And here people are wondering if the Fed will ever allow stocks to drop: it is now more than obvious that with all banks leveraging the equity exposure to the point where a market decline would likely start a Lehman-type domino, there is no way that the Brian Sack-led team of traders will allow stocks to drop ever... Until such time nature reasserts itself, the market collapses without GETCO or the PPT being able to catch it, and the Fed is finally wiped out in one way or another.

Chart: http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/imageroot/gono/CPFF%20Foreign%20Banks.jpg

The beginning of the end game…
Daniel Gros Stefano Micossi
20 September 2008

The largest European banks have become not only too big to fail but also too big to be saved. For example, the total liabilities of Deutsche Bank (leverage ratio over 50!) amount to around 2,000 billion euro, or over 80 % of the GDP of Germany. This is simply too much for the Bundesbank or even the German state to contemplate, given that the German budget is bound by the rules of the Stability pact and the German government cannot order (unlike the US Treasury) its central bank to issue more currency. The total liabilities of Barclays of around 1,300 billion pounds (leverage ratio over 60!) surpasses Britain’s GDP. Fortis bank, which has been in the news recently, has a leverage ratio of “only” 33, but its liabilities are several times larger than the GDP of its home country (Belgium).

Euro Banks Leverage/Ratio (total assets/equity

See authors calculations on data drawn from FT.com
http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/1669

The chief reason why the US bailed out foreign banks is that AIG insured these banks---and when the banking crisis hit, AIG did not have the resources to backup its insurance policies........as it was required to do.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the United States Treasury rescued AIG with a taxpayer backstop totaling $180 billion.

Now the US Treasury's $180 billion rescue is "interesting" since then-COS Rahm Emanuel ran Treasury activities. And the fact that AIG skated is also "interesting"

So where did that $180 billion go? "Professor" Ohaha knows nothing about high finance----but Rahm toiled on Wall Street before becoming a (gag) public servant (4 term Congressman, Clinton henchman, Fannie Mae looter).

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HOW DID GANGSTER GOVERNMENT SCAM $180 BILLION? PROBABLY LIKE THIS (the Madoff MO): The trustee ID'ing Madoff's assets, found Madoff created a labyrinth of interrelated international funds, institutions and financial entities of unparalleled complexity and breadth......with assets and businesses in multiple places offshore that hid government fraud, thievery, money launderering, tax evasion........ all out of sight of taxpayers, the IRS, SEC, FEC and US banking laws.

BTW, stolen money is taxable.

At least half a dozen people in the Ohaha admin are going to walk away from “Public Service“ living like the Sultan of Brunei......and we can name them all without even breaking a sweat.

DIOGENESIS POSTED: "The government bankers want to control the debt, And whoever controls the debt, controls everything. This is the essence of the banking industry, to make us all slaves to debt." (Umberto Calvi)

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POINTS TO PONDER

POINT ONE On June 9 President Obama called a press conference to announce, "Several financial institutions are set to pay back $68B to taxpayers." While Mr. Obama's announcement was welcome news, it was assumed that any money or profit would be returned to the general funds from whence it had come in order to pay down the debt. The truth, however, is that the money returned by the banks is finding new life as part of what amounts to a Treasury Department-controlled slush fund.

POINT TWO We keep reading and hearing Congress rushed to approve the "$787 billion stimulus package" early this year, but very little of it has been used. Uber-Lobbyist Thomas Hale Boggs, Esq (Patton Boggs) was interviewed by nightly network news and said there was $2 TRILLION federal stimulus waiting to be distributed..... AND that he is getting unprecendented numbers of calls from all over the US......from those who want a piece of it. Boggs is the son of former Cong Hale Boggs and sister of ABC-TV commentator Cokie Roberts.

POINT THREE Obama tapped VP Joe Biden to "allocate" the stimlulus $$trillions. Biden's family was involved with Texas financier H. Allen Stanford, now charged with an $8 billion offshore fraud, the WSJ said. The Bidens $50 million fund was jointly branded between the Bidens' Paradigm Global Advisors LLC and a Stanford Financial Group entity, and was known as the Paradigm Stanford Capital Management Core Alternative Fund, the paper said. Stanford-related companies marketed the fund to global investors and also invested about $2.7 million of their own money in the fund, the paper said, citing a lawyer for Paradigm.......... Paradigm Global Advisors is owned through a holding company by the VP's son, Hunter, and Joe Biden's brother, James, according to newspapers.

POINT FOUR How can this be legal? A jaw-dropping policy the White House released late on a Saturday afternoon........hoping we would not notice. "Following OMB’s review, the Obama Administration has decided to make a number of changes to the rules that we think make them even tougher on special interests and more focused on merits-based decision making. First, we will expand the restriction on oral communications to cover all persons, not just federally registered lobbyists. For the first time, we will reach contacts not only by registered lobbyists but also by unregistered ones, as well as anyone else exerting influence on the process. We concluded this was necessary under the unique circumstances of the stimulus program."

POINT FIVE The Reserve Primary Fund's recent failure was "a tragedy" said Crane Data. Without details, sounds like a very strange charge. It may just be a diversion and scapegoating in a broad "War on Wall Street" that Obama, Soros and FDIC's Sheila Bair, among others, are engaged in right now, to get complete control of our financial system.

Actually, this Fed "news" is old, if it's a "news" at all.

These were short term loans (TARP-like) that are exactly within the purview of the Fed to provide liquidity to banks and financial institutions during the acute liquidity crisis and subject to same liquidity attacks as Bear Stearns, Lehman, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and some foreign banks like ING, Dexia, Royal Bank of Scotland etc. etc., and continued to spread like ebola virus with runs on even the largest money-market-funds companies like massive run on Reserve Primary Fund whem it "broke the buck" in the wake of Lehman . GE Financial ran a financial credit facility unit / bank that was subject to the same liquidity attack.

Bernanke had to keep the recipients of the loans secret to prevent identifying weak links in the chain and the kind of situations that the politicians like Chuck Schumer created blabbering about inevitable defaults at and creating a run on Indymac and a "major insurance company" (AIG).

Bernanke studied and understood well how much damage was caused by the 1930s Depression era "bear raids" on the banks. Maybe it's not something that would please Mr. "Audit the Fed" Ron Paul, but thankfully, Bernanke and Paulson understood what financial and national security risk these liquidity crises and liquidity attacks present, and that the weak points had to be kept secret - that was no time for false "transparency".

Financial "Schumer's wikileaks" dumps were not helpful in dampening the crisis and stopping the attacks, it only helpd feed them. The public show of potentially massive liquidity support from the Fed and other countries' central banks (UK, France, Belgium / Netherlands, Bundesbank et al) and forced liquidation sale of weak banks did eventually stop the demolition of otherwise stable financial institutions and entire sovereign financial systems.

Most of these short term loans have earned and will earn substantial above-market rate-of-return interest. Even AIG, being dismembered and sold in pieces instead of allowing it to bleed even longer and take other institutions with it, will not cost taxpayers much, if anything at all, given recent successful IPOs of its AIA and sales of ALICO and ILFC units. AIG had substantial financial, but illiquid assets that could not be realized and would not get anywhere near their fair price if they had to be liquidated during liquidity crisis, even with all the stupid exposure to CDSs underwritten by Joe Cassano from his London's AIG Financial office.

This was not a "bailout of Wall Street fat cats" or some kind of idiotic shovel-ready "stimulus", this was a necessary measure to save $trillions of non-FDIC insured assets of the Main Street in time of "clear and present danger" to the economies of the U.S. and the rest of the "free world". Somebody had to deal with the consequences of three decades of the U.S. government destructive loose policies of "home ownership society".

Here is much better information on what the Fed did than Zerohedge / Marketinsider / Businessinsider / Marketticker and other "financial snake oil" blogs, that keep emphasis on the Fed and divert attention from politicians, CRA, Fannie-Freddie-FHA-HUD and other "usual suspects" (Barney Frank and his compadres must love these blogs) :

Excerpts from a long, but very informative article Fed Discloses Details of $3.3 Trillion in Crisis Loans - CNBC, by CNBC staff, 2010 December 01

< snip > ..... The newly released documents show the companies included Goldman Sachs , Citigroup , JPMorgan Chase , Bank of America and Wells Fargo.
They also show that foreign banks such as Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland and Deutche Bank were among the borrowers.
The documents are a reminder of how crippled the financial system had become during the crisis and how much it's recovered since. Banks earned $14 billion from July through September this year.
The figures provide details on more than $2 trillion the Fed lent through emergency programs from December 2007 to July this year to ease a credit crisis. The lending programs had never been used before and are now defunct. ..... < snip >
..... The Fed made more than 1300 loans under the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, or PDCF, set up for broker-dealers, with the largest — $47.9 billion — going to London-based Barclays, the Fed's data showed.
The facility marked the first time since the Great Depression that the Fed had lent to non-depository institutions. ..... < snip >
..... In addition, the Fed disclosed details on "swap" arrangements with foreign central banks. These swaps occurred when the Fed traded much-in-demand dollars for foreign currencies to try to ease credit. The foreign central banks, in turn, lent the dollars to banks in their countries. ..... < snip >
..... The Fed's programs were credited with helping restore the health of individual banks and stabilize the financial system. At the height of the crisis in the fall of 2008, credit had virtually dried up, worsening the deepest recession since the Great Depression.
One of the programs the Fed created provided low-cost, short-term loans to banks. Another sought to ease credit problems in the "commercial paper" market, which many U.S. companies use to finance everything from salaries to supplies.
Another was designed to spark low-cost lending to consumers and small businesses. Investors used the Fed's loans to buy securities backed by auto loans, credit cards and other debt. ..... < snip >
..... The Fed has long acted as a lender of last resort, offering commercial banks loans through its discount window when they couldn't obtain financing elsewhere. The Fed has kept secret the identities of such borrowers. It's expressed fear that naming such a bank could cause a run on it, defeating the purpose of the program. The Fed didn't oppose releasing the information being disclosed Wednesday. ..... < snip >

Of course, UK's Barclays was the party that eventually (belatedly) took over Lehman; the "commercial paper" / "repos" is the bloodlife of the trillions of dollars in commercial credit and "overnight" loans and normally "liquid" savings / "cash" the companies show on their balance sheets, so when that suddenly stops working even normally solvent, cash-rich companies may not be able to function (some cash-flow-positive companies had to go bankrupt in the week before TARP was finally voted for).

And the largest part of QE (not "stimulus") was/is done to facilitate the demand for dollars from overseas, from the U.S. and foreign companies - the problem is not the Fed, but stifling taxes, regulations, bureaucracy and overall business environment in the U.S. and most "developed" economies, so as the capital keeps leaving the U.S., the demand for USD$ increases.

get real, this is NOT your average liquidity crisis, it was manufactured and WE WILL PAY FOR IT.

Of course, "unmatched" / "naked" CDSs are a huge problem, and the crisis was made worse by the huge [politically inflated] housing bubble and entire world, not just the U.S., is paying for it, including continuing deflation in Japan (debt to GDP ~200%, aging and shrinking population demographics, CPI down by ~1%) and feverish inflation in China (real-estate, unaffordable ghost towns, even McDonald's just doubled the price on some items) etc. etc.

And, of course, it's not an ordinary liquidity crisis which is why it required extraordinary intervention by the "lender and intermediary of the last resort" - the Fed. But paying inordinate (and for some reason, negative) attention on internal mechanics of what the Fed and Bernanke have been doing to successfully restore the confidence in and liquidity of the financial system, i.e., looking at the effects instead of looking at the causes of the problem (politicians and government essentially running mortgage / real-estate industry as an experiment in political correctness since creation and establishment by Roosevelt of Fannie Mae in 1930s, and compounding it in later years with Ginnie Mae, Freddie Mac, and legislations like CRA which would penalize the banks for not making bad mortgages, as long as they were "politically correct" in the "community" the bank wanted to do business - see http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2634784/posts?page=10#10.) As long as government would take some of the bad loans off their hands, these losses would be a "loss-leader, a "cost of doing business". Expansion of CRA enforcement by HUD during Clinton regulatory era and via lawsuits, as well as loosening the minimum lending standards by Fannie and Freddie, led to the bubble where 9 out of 10 mortgages were owned or guaranteed (implicitly and explicitly) by government programs - Fannie, Freddie, FHA, VA, HUD.

All Fed did with TARP was help stem the liquidity crisis and the "netting" of the intertwined banking ("domestic" and "foreign") accounts, e.g., :

Bank A owns at one point $100B of Bank B's MBSs and has $100B of CDSs on that portfolio -> Bank B acquired $100B of Bank C's MBSs and has $100B of CDSs on that portfolio - > Bank C acquired $100B of Bank A's MBSs and has $100B of CDSs on that portfolio... So far so good... Liquidity crisis hits, housing prices fall, MBSs lose value, CDSs gain in value, creditworthiness of every bank (Bear Stearns, Lehman, Merrill, BoA, ???) is gone... Bottom line - nobody knows what they own today, let alone tomorrow... The Fed brings in bags of cash, assigns nominal values to some portfolios which everyone knows will recover when the panic is gone, and loans ("bails out") number of bags of cash to Bank A, which pays out that cash to Bank B, which pays out that cash to Bank C, which eventually pays it back to the Fed, but in the meantime, the potential debts and assets on the balance sheets of these banks shrink and are "netted out". The Fed gets paid good interest for its trouble, the banks are no longer under attack, if their balance of other assets to other debts are still viable and their business is strong enough to sustain normal losses in the bad economy. The Fed helps viable banks survive with easy "real" low-interest credit policies. Crisis solved, no thanks to politicians who have created it in the first place.

Very simplistic, I know, but I just wanted to show how "netting" generally works and what the Fed helped accomplish... So, do we still want to abolish the semi-independent Fed and transfer its functions to the "Representatives" of the people or to the White House / Treasury? So politicians like Dr. Ron Paul want to "audit the Fed"? Physician, Heal Thyself!

Look, I do understand what you have posted, BUT the problem is not just going to go away. CDS swaps are still being written. The game goes on. The FED is still piling up debt NO ONE CAN PAY. This entire country, if not the rest of the developed world will be in slavery due to compound interest that can NEVER be repaid.

Sure politicians caused this mess with the home ownership bogey man. BUT that does not excuse the out right fraud of the mortgage market and the massive loss of the documents that are the foundation of the common law property rights.

The lose of confidence has ALREADY begun. This damn will burst. The FED has and continues to lose creditability. Sure the politicians are crappy, but I would rather have REAL MONEY than the SHAM of debt backed notes that need MORE debt to forestall a crash.

This country is done with debt. If this theft continues, this nation will be destroyed. Keeping the current private bankers in charge of this country will NOT end well.

BUT the problem is not just going to go away.

When the Government essentially owns and runs the country's real estate and mortgage industry, obviously, the problem is structural, not temporary... and is not going away until that's fixed.

The FED is still piling up debt NO ONE CAN PAY.

Sorry, the Fed and monetary policy has not piled one dollar of debt - thank (or blame) the fiscal policies of your Congresses, along with the Presidents, for the PUBLIC debt you and your descendants will have to pay.

Sure politicians caused this mess with the home ownership bogey man.

Home ownership is not a bogeyman, the Fed has become the bogeyman for the politicians who desperately want to divert attention from themselves and their failed policies which is finally nakedly on display. And instead of "the political Emperor has no clothes" their flunkies keep pointing the finger of blame on the Fed and Bernanke, the few people who literally saved the country and people from immediate financial collapse...

The FED has and continues to lose creditability.

Of course, it does, and in no small part from disinformation propagated by politicians, either deliberately or unwittingly, on the blogs like Zerohedge et al, and by political commentators who decided they understand the economics by reading these sites... It's a vicious cycle of harmful negative feedback... just like miseducation of children in American public schools who grow up "knowing" that Reagan was the worst U.S. President because he was a "warmonger" and spent all the money on military instead of the poor, which "created" huge deficits, and that Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" saved the country from Great Depression.

This country is done with debt.

If that's what you really want, stop the indiscriminate Fed-bashing and Bernanke-bashing, and help educate and elect politicians to Congress, White House and state houses who can actually stop creating debt by spending and borrowing the money they don't have. That would be a good start.

Keeping the current private bankers in charge of this country will NOT end well.

The PUBLIC debt was and is created by your elected PUBLIC officials, in Congress, White House and state houses. You can understand that or you can continue following their lead and blame the Fed and keep sliding further down the rabbit hole of debt.

The Government IS the problem and SO IS the FED!!!!

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Of course the real estate market crash is structural since the Carter years, and since the lawyers have been suing over red lining.

“Sorry, the Fed and monetary policy has not piled one dollar of debt ...”

So who is going to pay all that FORIEGN BANKS debt the FED GAVE THEM. Them over there in Europe???? AH!!!! Besides, IT HAS BEEN THE CONGRESS PILING UP DEBT ON THE BACKS OF AMERCIANS SINCE 1913!!!!!!!! This has been going on for a LONG time. Long before you OR I were born.

As far as I am concerned, the FED and the politicians are in bed TOGETHER DESTROYING THIS COUNTRY!!!

I don’t get FED apologists. I admit it. The money the FED controls, that our CONgress allows, is DEBT backed currency. It is CREATED THOUGH DEBT. Why shouldn’t real conservatives want to be done with the corruption??? The theft though inflation????? What is WRONG with THAT?????

WE can stop the debt creation by putting CONGRESS on a real diet with NO CREDIT!!!!!! Politicians buy votes with the debt backed currency. The lie that the zombies believe is that the “rich” can pay for everything. The truth is that only a debt backed currency with mild inflation can pay for all the socialist lies the politicians tell. END THAT GRAVY TRAIN, END THE FED.

The politicians have already proved that they are INCAPABLE OF DOING THIS THEMSEVLES.

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