The truth about the Fed’s “salvation” of the financial systemforeign banks and corporations finally comes out:
U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s two-year fight to shield crisis-squeezed banks from the stigma of revealing their public loans protected a lender to local governments in Belgium, a Japanese fishing-cooperative financier and a company part-owned by the Central Bank of Libya.
Dexia SA (DEXB), based in Brussels and Paris, borrowed as much as $33.5 billion through its New York branch from the Fed’s “discount window” lending program, according to Fed documents released yesterday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Dublin-based Depfa Bank Plc, taken over in 2007 by a German real-estate lender later seized by the German government, drew $24.5 billion.
The biggest borrowers from the 97-year-old discount window as the program reached its crisis-era peak were foreign banks, accounting for at least 70 percent of the $110.7 billion borrowed during the week in October 2008 when use of the program surged to a record.
Bernanke, Paulson, and the various officials and the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury deserve prosecution for theft, at the very minimum. It was always obvious that they were milking the American taxpayer for someone’s benefit, but it can’t even be pretended that it was in the U.S. national interest anymore. The Federal Reserve isn’t a central bank, it is quite simply the greatest financial rapist in the history of mankind.