The real welfare queens

This is wonky but stunning. How the Fed covered up for the Banksters:

Citigroup Inc. (C) and Bank of America Corp. (BAC) were the reigning champions of finance in 2006 as home prices peaked, leading the 10 biggest U.S. banks and brokerage firms to their best year ever with $104 billion of profits.

By 2008, the housing market’s collapse forced those companies to take more than six times as much, $669 billion, in emergency loans from the U.S. Federal Reserve. The loans dwarfed the $160 billion in public bailouts the top 10 got from the U.S. Treasury, yet until now the full amounts have remained secret.

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s unprecedented effort to keep the economy from plunging into depression included lending banks and other companies as much as $1.2 trillion of public money, about the same amount U.S. homeowners currently owe on 6.5 million delinquent and foreclosed mortgages.

Basically, The Fed helped these guys hide the fact they were dead broke. And they did for Europe too.

I'm no expert. Maybe there no other choice. Have to think a massive global default would have been worse than the meltdown we had, and they claim they didn't lose a cent in the long run. In fact, they say made $13 billion "in interest and fee income."

But still it rankles that that not only was no one ever really held to account for allowing them to overextend in the first place, but no one seems to be all that interested in setting up new strict safeguards to make sure they don't do it again. What rules are proposed wouldn't even take effect until 2015 to 2018. Plenty of time for our political overlords to water them down to complete ineffectiveness. Furthermore, this has been kept a secret for this long at the behest of the Banksters.

Meanwhile, bankster profits are still mostly up and executive bonuses are ever rising while they lay off rank and file workers. And they're lending money to each other while the little guys can't get a tiny loan to save their livelihoods. Nor can they seem to find a few bucks to help underwater and other struggling homeowners.

As Atrios often says, it's their world. We're just living in it. If you can call the current state of the middle class living. More like barely surviving at this point. And they wonder why everyone hates "Washington, DC."

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]