Here is an interesting snippet…………the Fed handed over 1.2 trillion to financial institutions and basically hid the transactions. They only came to light, Aug 22nd, after Bloomberg News lengthy battle for disclosure. This wasn’t part of the 16.1 trillion the Fed handed over to US and foreign financial institutions between 2007-2010 and neither is it part of the 2 trillion QE programme, nor is it part of the 700 billion Tarps programme. So basically it was money ‘diverted’ into top flight world financial institutions to keep them afloat! The lists read like a who’s who in banking. To list a few……. Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Bank of America, State Street, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, even Countrywide Financial got in on the act. More interestingly for me is the fact that European banks accounted for about 50% of the book and the biggest borrower….RBS! Others included, UBS, Dexia, French Société Générale, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, and Crédit Suisse. Now it could be argued that they were merely borrowing at best rate because the disclosed annual interest payments of around 13 billion represents a rate of around 1%! Or it could be that without this ‘injection’ they would have gone to the wall and taken the rest of the sector with them. One thing is for sure taxpayers are well and truly on the hook for larger than admitted liabilities!