Sunday, March 29, 2009

Bailouts, Buyouts, Nationalizations: It's Never Enough

Martin Weiss writes:

... Two years ago, when major banks announced multibillion-dollar losses in subprime mortgages, the world's central banks injected unprecedented amounts of cash into the financial markets.

But that was not enough.

Six months later, when Lehman Brothers and AIG fell, the U.S. Congress rushed to pass the TARP, the greatest bank bailout legislation of all time.

But as it turned out, that wasn't sufficient either.

Subsequently, in addition to the original goal of TARP, the U.S. government has loaned, invested, or committed $400 billion to nationalize the world's two largest mortgage companies … $42 billion for the Big Three auto manufacturers … $29 billion for Bear Stearns, $185 billion for AIG, and $350 billion for Citigroup … $300 billion for the Federal Housing Administration Rescue Bill … $87 billion to pay back JPMorgan Chase for bad Lehman Brothers' trades … $200 billion in loans to banks under the Federal Reserve's Term Auction Facility (TAF) … $50 billion to support short-term corporate IOUs held by money market mutual funds … $500 billion to rescue various credit markets … $620 billion in currency swaps for industrial nations … $120 billion in swaps for emerging markets … trillions to cover the FDIC's new, expanded bank deposit insurance, plus trillions more for other sweeping guarantees.

And it STILL wasn't enough.

If it had been enough, the Fed would not have felt compelled this week to announce its plan to buy $300 billion in long-term Treasury bonds, an additional $750 billion in agency mortgage backed securities, plus $100 billion more in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac paper.

Total tally of government funds committed to date: Closing in on $13 trillion, or $1.15 trillion more than the tally just hours ago, when the body of this white paper was printed.

And yet, even that astronomical sum is still not enough! ...

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