The Biggest wealth transfer of all time

GE gets secret bailout money from the government and then runs positive news coverage on the Obama administration without mentioning the conflict. From the front page of the Washington Post:

. . . the Federal Reserve rushed trillions of dollars in emergency aid not just to Wall Street but also to motorcycle makers, telecom firms and foreign-owned banks in 2008 and 2009.

Fed's efforts to prop up the financial sector reached across a broad spectrum of the economy, benefiting stalwarts of American industry including General Electric and Caterpillar and household-name companies such as Verizon, Harley-Davidson and Toyota. The central bank's aid programs also supported U.S. subsidiaries of banks based in East Asia, Europe and Canada while rescuing money-market mutual funds held by millions of Americans.

The biggest users of the Fed lending programs were some of the world's largest banks, including Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Swiss-based UBS and Britain's Barclays, according to more than 21,000 loan records released Wednesday under new financial regulatory legislation. . . .

"The American people are finally learning the incredible and jaw-dropping details of the Fed's multitrillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street and corporate America," said Sen. Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.), a longtime Fed critic whose provision in the Wall Street regulatory overhaul required the new disclosures. "Perhaps most surprising is the huge sum that went to bail out foreign private banks and corporations. As a result of this disclosure, other members of Congress and I will be taking a very extensive look at all aspects of how the Federal Reserve functions."

The Fed launched emergency programs totaling $3.3 trillion in aid, a figure reached by adding up the peak amount of lending in each program.

Companies that few people would associate with Wall Street benefited through the Fed's program to ease the market for commercial paper, a form of short-term debt used by major corporations to fund their daily activities.

By the fall of 2008, credit had frozen across the financial system, including the commercial paper market. The Fed then purchased commercial paper issued by GE 12 times for a total of $16 billion. It bought paper from Harley-Davidson 33 times, for a total of $2.3 billion. It picked up debt issued by Verizon twice, totaling $1.5 billion. . . .

The data revealed that the Fed continued making purchases into the summer of 2009 - after the official end of the recession - showing that it was still concerned about a fundamental part of the financial system even as economic growth was returning. . . .

Foreign-owned banks also benefited from the Fed's commercial-paper facility. The Korean Development Bank, owned by the South Korean government, used the program to the tune of billions of dollars, including a $407 million short-term loan on a single day. Many foreign banks, including the French BNP Paribas, the Swiss UBS and the German Deutsche Bank, took extensive advantage of various programs. Even a major bank in Bavaria benefited, as well as another one headquartered in Bahrain, a tiny island country in the Middle East.

Another Fed program allowed investment banks for the first time to borrow directly from the Fed as officials sought to stem the panic that had taken down Wall Street titan Bear Stearns. The central bank assisted 18 companies through this program. Among the biggest beneficiaries was Citigroup, which in a single day in November 2008 borrowed $18.6 billion from the Fed.

The data also demonstrate how the Fed, in its scramble to keep the financial system afloat, eventually lowered its standards for the kind of collateral it allowed participating banks to post. From Citigroup, for instance, it accepted $156 million in triple-C collateral or lower - grades that indicate that the assets carried the greatest risk of default. . . . .

From the Financial Times:

Foreign banks were among the biggest beneficiaries of the $3,300bn in emergency credit provided by the Federal Reserve during the crisis, according to new data on the extraordinary efforts of the US authorities to save the global financial system. . . .

Barclays was the biggest cumulative borrower from TAF. The UK bank, which bought the US operations of Lehman Brothers out of bankruptcy in September 2008, borrowed a cumulative $232bn from the TAF through various subsidiaries.

Bank of Scotland and RBS of the UK, Société Générale of France, Dresdner Bank and Bayerische Landesbank of Germany, and Dexia of Belgium were all among the top 10 cumulative users of TAF. At any given time, these borrowers owed less than the total amount because the short-term loans were extended after they expired. . . .

Some of the beneficiaries:

New documents show that the most loan and other aid for U.S. institutions over time went to Citigroup ($2.2 trillion), followed by Merrill Lynch ($2.1 trillion), Morgan Stanley ($2 trillion), Bear Stearns ($960 billion), Bank of America ($887 billion), Goldman Sachs ($615 billion), JPMorgan Chase ($178 billion) and Wells Fargo ($154 billion). . . .
Foreign banks also benefited from the Fed's aid. They included Swiss bank UBS, which borrowed more than $165 billion, Deutsche Bank ($97 billion) and the Royal Bank of Scotland ($92 billion).
Many of the individual loans the banks took were worth billions and had short durations but were paid back and renewed many times.
Among the largest recipients were foreign central banks, such as the European Central Bank, Bank of England and the Bank of Japan. They borrowed huge amounts of dollars from the Fed to assist their own banks.
The documents are a reminder of how crippled the financial system had become during the crisis and how much it's recovered since. Banks earned $14 billion from July through September this year. . . .
Big U.S. and foreign banks made repeated use of the programs. Bank of America, for instance, took out 14 loans worth $15 billion each under the Fed program that provided short-term loans. The loans were repaid after either one month or three months. The last was repaid by July 2009.
Barclays, a British bank, tapped the same facility 49 times. Its individual loans ranged from $300 million to $15 billion. Citigroup used the program 26 times.
The documents help illustrate the global scope of the crisis. The Federal Reserve provided credit lines to some of the largest central banks overseas: The European Central Bank took $8 trillion in temporary credit lines, while the Bank of England took $918 billion. That credit ensured that overseas markets wouldn't freeze for a lack of U.S. dollars, the global reserve currency. . . .

Unfortunately, the Fed is refusing to release data on everything that they have done with the money. Another reason for Ron Paul's auditing the Fed bill?

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. . . .