Posted on 12/27/2011 6:08:43 PM PST by Iam1ru1-2
The first ever GAO(Government Accountability Office) audit of the Federal Reserve was carried out in the past few months due to the Ron Paul, Alan Grayson Amendment to the Dodd-Frank bill, which passed last year. Jim DeMint, a Republican Senator, and Bernie Sanders, an independent socialist Senator, led the charge for a Federal Reserve audit in the Senate, but watered down the original language of the house bill(HR1207), so that a complete audit would not be carried out. Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke(pictured to the right), former chairman, Alan Greenspan, and various other bankers vehemently opposed the audit and lied to Congress about the effects an audit would have on markets. Nevertheless, the results of the first audit in the Federal Reserve’s nearly 100 year history were posted on Senator Sander’s webpage earlier this morning (July 21, 2011).
What was revealed in the audit was startling: $16,000,000,000,000.00 had been secretly given out to US banks and corporations and foreign banks everywhere from France to Scotland. From the period between December 2007 (Bush's term) and June 2010 (Obama's term), the Federal Reserve had secretly bailed out many of the world’s banks, corporations, and governments. The Federal Reserve likes to refer to these secret bailouts as an all-inclusive loan program, but virtually none of the money has been returned and it was loaned out at 0% interest. Why the Federal Reserve had never been public about this or even informed the United States Congress about the $16 trillion dollar bailout is obvious - the American public would have been outraged to find out that the Federal Reserve bailed out foreign banks while Americans were struggling to find jobs.
To place $16 trillion into perspective, remember that GDP of the United States is only $14.12 trillion. The entire national debt of the United States government spanning its 200+ year history is "only" $14.5 trillion. The budget that is being debated so heavily in Congress and the Senate is "only" $3.5 trillion. Take all of the outrage and debate over the $1.5 trillion deficit into consideration, and swallow this Red pill: There was no debate about whether $16,000,000,000,000 would be given to failing banks and failing corporations around the world. In late 2008, the TARP Bailout bill was passed and loans of $800 billion were given to failing banks and companies. That was a blatant lie considering the fact that Goldman Sachs alone received 814 billion dollars. As is turns out, the Federal Reserve donated $2.5 trillion to Citigroup, while Morgan Stanley received $2.04 trillion. The Royal Bank of Scotland and Deutsche Bank, a German bank, split about a trillion and numerous other banks received hefty chunks of the $16 trillion.
"This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you’re-on-your-own individualism for everyone else." - Bernie Sanders (I-VT)
When you have conservative Republican stalwarts like Jim DeMint(R-SC) and Ron Paul(R-TX) as well as self identified Democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders all fighting against the Federal Reserve, you know that it is no longer an issue of Right versus Left. When you have every single member of the Republican Party in Congress and progressive Congressmen like Dennis Kucinich sponsoring a bill to audit the Federal Reserve, you realize that the Federal Reserve is an entity onto itself, which has no oversight and no accountability. Sanders said one thing already is abundantly clear. "The Federal Reserve must be reformed to serve the needs of working families, not just CEOs on Wall Street."
Americans should be swelled with anger and outrage at the abysmal state of affairs when an unelected group of bankers can create money out of thin air and give it out to megabanks and supercorporations like Halloween candy. If the Federal Reserve and the bankers who control it believe that they can continue to devalue the savings of Americans and continue to destroy the US economy, they will have to face the realization that their trillion dollar printing presses will eventually plunder the world economy (as may be their intent).
The list of institutions that received the most money from the Federal Reserve can be found on page 131 of the GAO Audit and are as follows..
Citigroup: $2.5 trillion ($2,500,000,000,000) Morgan Stanley: $2.04 trillion ($2,040,000,000,000) Merrill Lynch: $1.949 trillion ($1,949,000,000,000) Bank of America: $1.344 trillion ($1,344,000,000,000) Barclays PLC (United Kingdom): $868 billion ($868,000,000,000) Bear Sterns: $853 billion ($853,000,000,000) Goldman Sachs: $814 billion ($814,000,000,000) Royal Bank of Scotland (UK): $541 billion ($541,000,000,000) JP Morgan Chase: $391 billion ($391,000,000,000) Deutsche Bank (Germany): $354 billion ($354,000,000,000) UBS (Switzerland): $287 billion ($287,000,000,000) Credit Suisse (Switzerland): $262 billion ($262,000,000,000) Lehman Brothers: $183 billion ($183,000,000,000) Bank of Scotland (United Kingdom): $181 billion ($181,000,000,000) BNP Paribas (France): $175 billion ($175,000,000,000) and many many more including banks in Belgium of all places
View the 266-page GAO audit of the Federal Reserve (July 21st, 2011): http://www.scribd.com/doc/60553686/GAO-Fed-Investigation Source: http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-11-696 FULL PDF on GAO server: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d11696.pdf Senator Sander’s Article: http://sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=9e2a4ea8-6e73-4be2-a753-62060dcbb3c3
www.unelected.org
Numbers two through seven mostly or completely false.
In reality it's about putting 20 trillion of debt obligation upon the private sector aka taxpayers.
Slavery can also be defined as not being capable of purchasing your freedom.
Taxpayers will never be able to pay off all the debt placed upon them. Therefore they will never be free of obligations to the government ...of the Federal Reserve banks.
Total transactions were $16T, which is greater than GDP. Unlike loans, GDP counts "economic" transactions, i.e. I build you a garage for $40,000, having spent $20,000 on supplies and buy a car for $20,000 that is $60,000 in GDP. Unlike credit transactions, the sales and the purchase add rather than cancel.
#6 and #7 are completely true. The resultant inflation in financial assets encourages borrowing of what we must admit is FED and banking system generated money to purchase financial assets betting on their appreciation, the bubble which has now at long last burst despite all the hot air out of Washington DC, NY and the shills for the banking system. Savings (spending less than income and putting the balance in an investment account, i.e. saving money) is thereby discouraged. Greenspan himself admitted that this destablizes the economy, but his excuse was that he did not realize that the stockholders of financial institutions would allow management to put their capital at excessive risk.
#5 use to be true prior to the conclusion of WWII. With all the nuclear weapons lying around waiting for a good use, let us hope that it is not so anymore.
#2 and #3 are political opinions with which one might or might not agree.
One has to know the Fed's objectives to know whether the Fed has accomplished them. If it is to assure the stability of the banking system (i.e. profitability, since an unprofitable banking system is an unstable one), they seem to have accomplished that. Now that is easier than the others since that can be accomplished on the whole by providing banks "loans" at interest rates well below what they can turn around and reloan the money at. Therefore depending upon your view of the stated objectives of the Fed #1 may or may not be the one that is clearly false.
Come on...... I don’t like the Fed but they only loaned out 1.5 trillion not 16 trillion. Not counting the TALF contrivance. 1.5 trillion is the Bloomberg calculation
If you borrow $50,ooo from a bank for one year, the GAO way of calculating it would be you borrowed $50,ooo x 365 days amounting to $18,200,000
I don't necessarily believe all 7 of G. Edward Griffin's points responding to Flaherty, but I think the key point is #4 inflation is the gift that just keeps on giving.
It is the reason the Federal Reserve System is coming to an end. As those of us who have read and appreciate Mr. Griffin's book know, this country has a long history of rejecting the desires of bankers.
If you looked at their balance sheet, you'd see the short term loans they made.
Toddsterpatriot would have us believe this is common practice
Not common practice at all. These programs were emergency measures.
but this audit reveals exactly who needed to balance their books and when. That is information not commonly made public.
That's correct. Until the audit, they never released info on who borrowed at the Discount Window.
In the first place $1.5T is more than "only," not counting the TALF contrivance, among the multitude of alphabet soup "contrivances that were invented to "stabilize the banking system. In the second place, and my point, the total transactional value of the FED's market interventions exceeded the GDP of the country. Now put the usual multiplier on banking system money and you discover that FED generated financial transactions exceeded "real economic" transactions by a large multiplier. (transactions involving the purchase and sale of goods and services including the wonderful service provided by federal state and local governments).
There is another way of viewing this, which is arguably not totally falacious. It is like someone who gambles every day. On any given day he might only have $1000 out on the horses and closes his transactions before taking on the next one, but if he does this every day, and if statistics work (i.e. he at least loses the bookies' fee on every transaction), his risk is not $1000 but considerably more.
Or consider the guy who drinks a quart of vodka every night. Now, he "eliminates it" quickly enough, so at any one time he is body inventory is only, say, 1/2 a pint. The guy has a problem that someone else who only does a 1/2 pint on New Year and his birthday does not have.
And I don't think analogies to drunkards and gamblers are totally irrelevant to our present economic situation.
To stabilize the banking system and ensure the return to profitability, as you keep telling us.
Banks mostly.
Mostly? Who else got hundreds of billions or trillions Todd?
What was the emergency?
yuk yuk...
This was such an unprecedented crisis, that they were not even embarassed when they blackmailed the government into bailing them out, while retaining their bonuses. We are all better off for having a banking system, even one like this. Fellow freepers assure me of this and I believe them.
I'll never ever forget these bailouts, which started under Bush...
I knew at the time, it would be one bailout after another...Lots of corrupt insiders lined up with their hands out, filling the trunks of their limos with cash on their way to parties at AIG.
However, tax payers need not apply for any bailout. Those suckers are on their own, and if they fall behind, they get their asses and assets seized.
Todd will, in his smarmy way, take exception to your factual distortions and remind you that non-banking companies such as Government Motors and GE (which had grown into more of a financial operation than a manufacturing one, some of their detractors have suggested) were also recipients of these credit facilities to ensure that they did not suffer from a temporary liquidity crisis. Don't try hyperbole with Todd around. He is a serious man and all business in his shilling for his employers. And it has worked too. Why on this very thread I have learned that his paycheck is doing just fine and has not diminished since the banking crisis began.
Almost the entire middle class private sector has seen their dollars and incomes shrink, getting economically gang raped, as the price of everything skyrockets, but Todd, is not affected and doing great..
lol
Why is everyone so pissy about that? It is not even one day of TARP bailout. It is about 1/100th of 1 percent of a Federal Reserve credit facilitization exercise. Who cares? They act like it is real money, and worse, they act like it is their money.
Yeah, mostly. Why don’t you do some of your own research?
Wrong. You learned that my paycheck didn't get reduced to pay for the money the Fed created when they made these loans.
They all but driven the country over the cliff.
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