Bloomberg: Fed Doled Out $1.2T to Banks

To stave off the financial crisis, the ""Federal Reserve"":federal reserve supplied the biggest Wall Street firms with $1.2 trillion in funds, an amount that overshadows the more public transfer of funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), according to ""_Bloomberg News_"":http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-22/u-s-index-futures-fall-oil-drops-on-growth-concern-correct-.html, which broke the story. According to the news service, the U.S. central bank wrote some 21,000 checks to institutions like Bank of America, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase, plus a number of European banks.

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_Bloomberg_ reporters Bradley Keoun and Phil Kuntz obtained the information through an act of Congress, after filing for the release of the transactions under the Freedom of Information Act.

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The reporters wrote that 29,346 pages of documents, coupled with information from other federal databases, ""make clear for the first time how deeply the world's largest banks depended on the U.S. central bank to stave off cash shortfalls.""

According to the news service, mortgage giant ""Bank of America"":https://www.bankofamerica.com/ received $91.4 billion in emergency funds, a slightly lesser figure when compared with $99.5 billion taken by ""Citigroup"":http://www.citigroup.com/citi/homepage/.

Federal program TARP added to the bailouts by providing Bank of America and Citigroup each with $45 billion. Meanwhile, ""Morgan Stanley"":http://www.morganstanley.com/ received only $10 billion from the federal program.

JPMorgan in particular accrued some $152.1 billion in loans outstanding, according to the ""_San Francisco Chronicle_"":http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/08/22/bloomberg1376-LPTQOF0D9L3501-650OAQ3AA5G1QBS4JQ9VK7ODJH.DTL, while the Fed made securities available at fees nearly free of risk for the institution. The newspaper said that it borrowed and purchased $111 billion in securities.

Despite the imbalance and manner in which it distributed these funds, the Federal Reserve said that it benefited from a $13 billion boon in interest from the loans over the course of two years, starting in August 2007 and ending December 2009.

None of the banks and financial institutions listed by these news services offered written statements to the press at the time of this writing.