Technology Slice Blog

Bernie Sanders vs The Federal Reserve - So now we know, thanks to Sen. Bernie Sanders, some of the sordid details of the Federal Reserve Board’s “come and get it” policy. The Fed opened its vaults—our vaults—to the tune of $3.3 trillion in liquidity and $9 trillion in short-term low-interest loans to some of the world’s biggest banks. These included giant foreign banks, as well as Citigroup and Bank of America and other large domestic financial institutions. Morgan Stanley got nearly $2 trillion. Citigroup got $1.8 trillion. Goldman Sachs got $600 billion. Not only that, the Fed threw money at some of the biggest corporations in the land, including Caterpillar, General Electric, McDonald’s and Verizon. These were loans with no interest, or almost no interest, at a time when American consumers and small businesses couldn’t find loans to save their lives. Sen. Sanders wrote the law that required the Fed, against its wishes, to disclose who got all this money. Sanders said the ...

Federal Reserve Questionable Bailout - The Federal Reserve Board has pulled back the curtain on the companies that took advantage of its short-term loans and other emergency programs that it set up during the financial crisis. The Fed on Wednesday posted on a public website details of 21,000 transactions from December 2007 through July 2010 that totaled more than $3 trillion. The help was provided not only to giant banks such as Bank of America Corp., Wells Fargo & Co. and JPMorgan Chase & Co., but also to companies such as General Electric Co., Caterpillar Inc. and Harley-Davidson Inc. The Fed said its aim most often was to provide them with liquidity — that is, to keep them from running out of cash — when the private credit markets froze up. Sen. Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.), who wrote the measure that forced the disclosures, accused the central bank of conducting a secret "backdoor bailout" of big banks and corporations. The program dwarfed the much-criticized $7...