If You Want to Go Dumpster Diving at the Fed

Bloomberg has released the bailout secured from Federal reserve as a result of their successful FOIA litigation:

Bloomberg News today released spreadsheets showing daily borrowing totals for 407 banks and companies that tapped Federal Reserve emergency programs during the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis. It’s the first time such data have been publicly available in this form.

To download a zip file of the spreadsheets, go to http://bit.ly/Bloomberg-Fed-Data. For an explanation of the files, see the one labeled “1a Fed Data Roadmap.”

The day-by-day, bank-by-bank numbers, culled from about 50,000 transactions the U.S. central bank made through seven facilities, formed the basis of a series of Bloomberg News articles this year about the largest financial bailout in history.

What is revealed here, in the short form, is that the lending window was at below market rates, as opposed to the, "penalty over normal market rates," claimed by the Fed.

Additionally, on a quick look at the article, the lending, and the backstopping, where what amounted to loan guarantees were provided as a sort of a back door subsidy to allow banks to borrow at lower rates, it appears that this totaled more than ten trillion ($10,000,000,000,000.00) dollars, or something in excess of ½ the GDP of the United States of America.

It should also be noted that this is only the stuff that Bloomberg managed to pry from the Fed's fingers, and I'm certain that we will see this number grow as more rocks are turned over.