Fed to Name Recipients of $3.3 Trillion in WELFARE During Crisis

[DrDoom]

The Trillionaire Welfare club to be revealed except of course the Welfare queens who continue to gorge themselves at the public trough via the discount welfare window.

In the meantime we have apologists continuing to focus on entitlements, haggling over tax cuts for these same welfare queens and allowing the Fed and Treasury to continue RIPPING OFF the American people for the benefit of a financial oligarchy that has hijacked the Gov't thanks to supine corrupt politicians and their peasant pundits...

The Federal Reserve, under orders from Congress, plans today to identify recipients of $3.3 trillion in emergency aid the central bank provided as it fought the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

The Fed intends to post the data on its website at midday in Washington to comply with a provision in July’s Dodd-Frank law overhauling financial regulation. The information spans six loan programs as well as currency swaps with other central banks, purchases of mortgage-backed securities and the rescues of Bear Stearns Cos. and American International Group Inc.

The disclosures may heighten political scrutiny of the central bank already at its most intense in three decades. The Fed’s Nov. 3 decision to add $600 billion of monetary stimulus has met with backlash from top Republicans in Congress, who said in a Nov. 17 letter to Chairman Ben S. Bernanke that the action risks inflation and asset-price bubbles.

“It is quite conceivable it is going to stir up the political pot,” said Ward McCarthy, chief financial economist at Jefferies & Co. Inc. in New York. “But political criticism isn’t going to prevent them from doing what they need to do. An important part of being a Fed official is to understand whatever you do is going to come under scrutiny.”

The data will probably show the magnitude of central bank support to companies including Bank of America Corp. and General Electric Co. after the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. spurred a surge in private borrowing costs. Lawmakers demanded disclosure after the Fed approved aid dwarfing the federal government’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Discount Window

Congress excluded one Fed program from disclosure, the discount window, which is the subject of a 2008 lawsuit filed by Bloomberg LP, parent of Bloomberg News, against the central bank. A group of banks is appealing to the Supreme Court over lower-court decisions ordering the Fed to identify loan recipients. The program peaked at $110.7 billion in October 2008.

“We see this not as the end of a process but really a significant step forward in opening the veil of secrecy that exists in one of the most powerful agencies in government,” Senator Bernard Sanders, the Vermont Independent who wrote the provision on Fed disclosure, said to reporters Nov. 17.

U.S. central bankers stepped outside of their traditional role as a lender of last resort to banks as credit markets nearly ground to a halt in the wake of Lehman’s bankruptcy on Sept. 15, 2008. Bernanke pushed the boundaries of the Fed’s powers, using section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act, which allowed the central bank to aid non-banks under “unusual and exigent circumstances.”


Fed to Name Recipients of $3.3 Trillion in Aid During Crisis - Bloomberg

[DrDoom]

Yeah b/c the so called collateral is WORTHLESS toxic crap. Taxpayer is never going to recoup anything b/c the Fed assumed JUNK!

The Federal Reserve withheld details on individual securities pledged as collateral by recipients of $885 billion in central bank loans, denying taxpayers a measure of the risks they faced from its emergency aid.

The central bank yesterday released data on 21,000 transactions from $3.3 trillion in emergency lending to stem the financial crisis. July’s Dodd-Frank law required the Fed to disclose the names of borrowers, the size and interest rates of loans, and “information identifying the types and amounts of collateral pledged or assets transferred.”

For three of the Fed’s six emergency facilities, the central bank released information on groups of collateral it accepted by asset type and rating, without specifying individual securities. Among them was the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, created in March 2008 to provide loans to brokers as Bear Stearns Cos. collapsed.

“This is a half-step,” said former Atlanta Fed research director Robert Eisenbeis, chief monetary economist at Cumberland Advisors Inc. in Sarasota, Florida. “If you were going to audit the facilities, then would this enable you to do an audit? The answer is ‘No,’ you would have to go in and look at the individual amounts of collateral and how it was broken down to do that. And that is the spirit of what the requirements were in Dodd-Frank.”

Fed spokeswoman Susan Stawick in Washington declined to comment.

Federal Reserve Withholds Collateral Data, Denying Taxpayers Gauge of Risk - Bloomberg