Editor's Note: In light of the Goldman theft detailed in today's report, we are reposting this story from last month.
Bernanke is not a loan shark to those he loves...
So if Goldman was getting free cash from The Ben Ber-Nank, the situation at 85 Broad must have been really dicey later on when Blankfein turned to Buffett.
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Fed names recipients of $3.3 trillion in crisis aid
- At Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Wall Street’s most profitable securities firm, borrowing from the Primary Dealer Credit Facility peaked at $24 billion in October 2008. “Without question, direct government support was critical in stabilizing the financial system, and we benefitted from it,” Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein said in January 2010.
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NEW YORK -- For the lucky few on Wall Street, the Federal Reserve sure was sweet. Nine firms -- five of them foreign -- were able to borrow between $5.2 billion and $6.2 billion in U.S. government securities, which effectively act like cash on Wall Street, for four-week intervals while paying one-time fees that amounted to the minuscule rate of 0.0078 percent.
That is not a typo.
On 33 separate transactions, the lucky nine were able to borrow billions as part of a crisis-era Fed program that lent the securities, known as Treasuries, for 28-day chunks to the now-18 firms known as primary dealers that are empowered to trade with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The program, called the Term Securities Lending Facility, ensured that the firms had cash on hand to lend, invest and trade. The market was freezing up. Effectively free money, courtesy of Uncle Sam, helped it thaw.
The European firms -- Credit Suisse (Switzerland), Deutsche Bank (Germany), Royal Bank of Scotland (U.K.), Barclays (U.K.), and BNP Paribas (France) -- borrowed $5.2-6.2 billion in Treasuries 20 different times. The one-time fees they paid on each transaction ranged from $403,277.78 to $481,110. Deutsche led the way with seven such deals.
On each transaction, the fee paid for the 28-day loan is equal to a rate of just 0.0078%.
The first of these sweetheart deals began April 17, 2008. They ended nearly a year later on March 5. On that day, Goldman Sachs borrowed about $5.8 billion and paid just $450,000 for the privilege.
Goldman was one of four American firms that also paid that rock-bottom rate. Citigroup, defunct investment bank Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch, which was gobbled up by Bank of America in a government-pushed transaction, benefited from the save-Wall-Street-at-all-costs approach. Goldman and Citi got the 0.0078 percent rate on five separate occasions, tops among U.S. banks.
Continue reading at the Huffington Post...
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Goldman Sachs doing God's work...
Video - Ratigan with Nomi Prins
Nomi is a former managing director at Goldman.
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