$1.2 Trillion in Secret Additional Bailout for Banks with No Collateral and No Commitments « Livinglies's Weblog
Of course the figure is much higher, but the secrecy surrounding the money given by the Fed to the banks is something to enrage any tea party advocate and for that matter any taxpayer. The Federal Reserve window was opened to banks who actually sold their mortgage bonds — worth nothing — to the Federal Reserve under the guise of a loan that would never be repaid. The program correctly explained in this video was one of many totaling more money than the principal on all the defaulted loans put together. The kicker is that the mortgage bonds they sold probably didn’t belong to them! (But they were acting as agents for investor/lenders whether they like to think of it that way or not.
Add to that the proceeds they received from insurance, credit default swaps, cross collateralization, overcollateralization and servicer payments (made to creditors with reports stating the loans were performing), and you have real boondoggle fueled by ideology instead of arithmetic. If the banks received more money than they loaned, then how are those loans in default? If your Aunt Tilly pays off your mortgage, your non-payment after she pays it off is not a default because there is no payment due! In this case it was Uncle Sam who paid it off and a bunch of third parties who were all making money, having sold the loans multiple times under the guise of exotic derivatives and synthetic derivatives.
SO the Banks made a ton of money in “off balance sheet” transactions which remain off balance sheet because they are hiding profits and not paying taxes. THEN they claimed losses because the money they made was “off balance sheet” and received a “bailout” they didn’t need equal to all the money that was loaned.