A List of Banks Your $350 billion in taxpayer funds saved from going belly up...

[Subdivisions]

$350 billion in U.S. taxpayer funds!!! To foriegn banks!!!

But no more unemployment for you!

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/meet-35-foreign-banks-got-bailed-out-fed-and-just-cpff-banks

One may be forgiven to believe that via its FX liquidity swap lines the Fed only bailed out foreign Central Banks, which in turn took the money and funded their own banks. It turns out that is only half the story: we now know the Fed also acted in a secondary bail out capacity, providing over $350 billion in short term funding exclusively to 35 foreign banks, of which the biggest beneficiaries were UBS, Dexia and BNP. Since the funding provided was in the form of ultra-short maturity commercial paper it was essentially equivalent to cash funding. In other words, between October 27, 2008 and August 6, 2009, the Fed spent $350 billion in taxpayer funds to save 35 foreign banks. And here people are wondering if the Fed will ever allow stocks to drop: it is now more than obvious that with all banks leveraging the equity exposure to the point where a market decline would likely start a Lehman-type domino, there is no way that the Brian Sack-led team of traders will allow stocks to drop ever... Until such time nature reasserts itself, the market collapses without GETCO or the PPT being able to catch it, and the Fed is finally wiped out in one way or another.

...snip...

The 35 companies in question:

UBS
Dexia SA
BNP Paribas
Barclays PLC
Royal Bank of Scotland Group
Commerzbank AG
Danske Bank A/S
ING Groep NV
WestLB
Handelsbanken
Deutsche Post AG
Erste Group Bank AG
NordLB
Free State of Bavaria
KBC
HSH Nordbank AG
Unicredit
HSBC Holdings PLC
DZ Bank AG
Republic of Korea
Rabobank
Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation
Banco Espirito Santo SA
Bank of Nova Scotia
Mizuho Corporate Bank, Ltd.
Syngenta AG
Mitsui & Co Ltd
Bank of Montreal
Caixa Geral de Depósitos
Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group
Shinhan Financial Group Co Ltd
Mitsubishi Corp
Aegon NV
Royal Bank of Canada
Sumitomo Corp

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http://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_fedsbalancesheet.htm

[midnight]

1. I have not heard of these banks before?

[Subdivisions]

2. That's because they're all foreign (not U.S. -based) n/t

[pnwmom]

3. They've gotten all the money back, by the way.

A fact that often seems to be overlooked. They also lent money to many major businesses, who needed short term money to keep their cash flow going. Without those loans we would have had a much greater decline in the economy -- with much greater job losses than the ones that we're still suffering from now. We would very likely be looking at Depression era unemployment levels if those loans hadn't been made.

None of this excuses not extending unemployment checks. But it isn't like we needed to choose whether to lend money to the banks OR extend unemployment. We could have and should have done both. The temporary loans to the banks and corporations made sense -- and kept millions of workers in their jobs. And extending unemployment benefits makes sense -- it provides temporary income for those who need it, and goes right back into the economy.