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
You seem to be the expert here, so who else got the billions and trillions Todd?
Be sure to let me know when you find out. LOL!
It was your comment. If ya don’t want to say what it is, no problem.
Everyone else around here sees that you have fallen into the same fallacy as crack whores who think that if the government would just print a bunch of money and spread it around we would all be rich.
This is not ignorance, since it has been pointed out before. It is just plain old-fashioned stupidity, no, it is worse. It is wanton.
I’m trying to discern your motive. It’s as if you supported TARP. Then you reconcile it with, they all paid it back.
Well, that’s wonderful. Imagine if any one of us could accept a few billion for a few months/years, and what we might do with it. I figure with a few choice investments, I could pay the govt back while making a mill or two. Do you think this is what they did?
Nevermind, they would never do that.
This is why they penalized their executives, and no bonuses were given to any of them./s
1. We know that Todd has a lot of detailed knowledge about some things going on in the financial industry, peculiar technical things about trading financial securities so he has access to or instruction by the financial services "industry."
2. He is salaried. If this were not enough we would have guessed based on his inability to pick up on substantive clues that make a difference about things that he is not a trader, or at least not a very good one. He could be doing back office work. He is too egomaniacal and lacks the smoothness to be very good at anything involving relations with others. Perhaps he does clerical work at the FED, an institution he cannot bring himself to say one bad word about. In fact, he more than anyone around here defends everything the FED does. He could be a gofer for one of the FED governors.
3. He has very limited knowledge about basic economic principles, you know like printing money steals from those who engage in productive enterprise.
4. He is basically immoral.
5. Despite his ignorance about fundamental economics he has an unshakable faith in his sense of intellectual self-superiority. He must have studied a soft subject like sociology at an ivy league institution to combine such arrogance and ignorance in one package.
6. He obviously gets angry and defensive when you call him a shill, but he continues to shill anyway. Someone must be paying him for this.
And Toddster here was defending them then as he is now. This is not ignorance. It is the arrogance of a corrupt organization that believes you can do nothing to shake them as they grasp for more and more. We "need" them. Funny how things worked just fine when every good parent took their little boys and girls to the local S&L (remember when we used to have S&Ls back before a bunch of folks including a Bush took down the S&L industry) to deposit their savings (remember when we used to have savings) in a savings account (back before people had money market accounts), and back before Arthure Burns and Jimmy Carter made a cruel joke of saving (actually Carter gets a bit of a bum rap for this since it was LBJ's Great Society and Nixon who really got going the business of spending more than we had). And remember when the local S&L manager made mortgage loans to homebuyers which were sound investments for the bank because with 20% downpayments and a good employment record and clear knowledge of local conditions, the mortgage was secure.
Sure, we need banks. The world has always had banks, even back when it was Jewish bankers sitting on a bench in teh public square. But we don't need these kinds of banks, an entire financial services industry consuming an ever bigger portion of the world's economic output while they ruin everyone else (boy is that an old song too, part of the collapse of the Roman empire and Greek city states among other things).
Who said that? Where?
This is not ignorance, since it has been pointed out before.
Please explain how $16 trillion loaned and paid back, with interest, reduces my paycheck or causes inflation or harms me in any way.
Motive for what? Trying to reduce the ignorance on these subjects?
It’s as if you supported TARP.
I did.
Then you reconcile it with, they all paid it back.
The banks paid back their portion, at a profit to the Treasury.
I figure with a few choice investments, I could pay the govt back while making a mill or two.
Which choice investments would you have made?
LOL!
Ever heard of free market enterprise, where businesses compete against each other, for their share of the market?
For all I know, you may work for the govt. In that case, what I am about to say, will be alien, to you.
In a free market economy, the fed.gov is not Constitutionally authorized to pick and choose winners. I saw where you admitted you supported TARP.
What? You can't support a free market economy-capitalism, and support the fed.gov picking winners, and losers, with taxpayer money.
No, you personally may not have been harmed. And investors in those failing corps, which were "bailed out," may have suffered less. But my FRiend, that's socialism. I'm a free market capitalist. Where the market picks winners, and losers. Not the fed.gov.
If I make a bad investment, and I have, the fed.gov will not loan me the money, to give me a chance to recover my losses. Since I am NOT "too big to fail." But it does, and has, for others. You admittedly support this socialism. I support capitalism, and am vehemently opposed to socialism/communism.
I have heard of free market enterprise.
Does that have anything to do with you avoiding the explanation I asked for?
For all I know, you may work for the govt.
I don't.
I saw where you admitted you supported TARP.
Yes.
What? You can't support a free market economy-capitalism, and support the fed.gov picking winners, and losers, with taxpayer money.
The government was supporting the banking system. To prevent a repeat of the massive wave of bank failures we suffered during the Great Depression.
He defends bailing out bankers by the societal need to bail out banks, as if the two are the same. Had strict oversight of failing banks been established, had bonuses been eliminated for a reasonable time (5 years) at any rescued institution (and that includes Goldman Sachs who were bailed out by bailing out AIG), and base salaries set at reasonable levels, had the federal government taken and maintained substantial equity positions in the bailed out institutions, we could have some sympathy for the position that the banking system needed to be saved.
Of course folks will whine that the government cannot competently run and own banks. Well, OK, but, it turns out the bankers who were entrusted with running the banking system were just as incompetent, and worse, racked off fortunes in the process. Greenspan admitted that his mistake was to believe that so-called private enterprise would not do what private enterprise had already been doing before everyone's eyes, including his own.
This semantic distortion is what I mean by your dishonest and transparent shilling. The government was not supporting the "banking system." The Federal Reserve was supporting a small number of very large banks. The former is the excuse. As we have been learning ever more and more, the point of the exercies, the purchase of congressional votes, the stuffing of cabinet agencies was all done for a few banks. If others got a few crumbs, well it is an old trading rule that you leave some profit on the table for the other guy.
You, and those for whom you are a shill, try to portray this as a win-win. But as the enormity of the cost of all of this becomes apparent, it is obvious that the American public have lost, big time. My initial reaction to Paulson's ploy to get TARP remains. Give us $700 B (it turned out to be a lot more than that as we have seen), or we will take down the US economy.
Your defense of a bunch of high priced looters is immoral.
Paulson claimed "we will take down the US economy"? LOL!
The only thing funnier than your ignorance is your poor memory.
The arrogance with which you shill for your lords and masters is just astonishing. The facts simply do not support your claims.
Which of my claims is incorrect?
By my standard, anyone who supported TARP is a socialist. It was unconstitutional, and corrupted.
Creature from Jekyll Island? Enlighten me. I can check the chapter and verse if you'll spell it out.
He thinks banks create money out of thin air.
He thinks banks don’t want you to repay your loan.
He thinks that when you default on a loan, the bank doesn’t care, because they created the money out of thin air.
He thinks a bank with a $100 deposit can make a $900 loan.
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