Fed Audit Reveals US Federal Reserves’ $16 Trillion Bailouts of Foreign Banks

A staggering $16 trillion of bailout money had been extended to foreign banks by the US Federal Reserve during the last crisis!

That’s the finding from the audit commissioned by US Congress through the GAO

From New American

During a 2½ year period starting at the end of 2007, the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in secret bailouts to banks and other companies around the world, according to a government audit of some of the U.S. central bank’s operations.

Much of the Fed's largesse was lavished on banks in Europe (such as Barclays, left) and Asia, the audit revealed. More than $3 trillion, for example, went to financial institutions in just five European countries. Trillions more flowed toward some of the biggest banks in America. Institutions from Brazil and Mexico to South Korea and Canada also benefited.
The 266-page report, produced by Congress’s non-partisan investigative service known as the Government Accountability Office (GAO), has already sparked intense outrage since its release on July 21. Fed apologists, however, have been quick to defend the actions, saying they were “necessary” to “save” the economy and justified under the Federal Reserve Act.

“The scale and nature of this assistance amounted to an unprecedented expansion of the Federal Reserve System’s traditional role as lender-of-last-resort to depository institutions,” the report stated.

And the crisis had been also used to extend financial privileges by the politically connected. Again from the same article,

According to the analysis, more than 80 percent of the Fed’s largest contracts to manage the programs were awarded without bidding.

Many of the companies that received the contracts were also being showered with central-bank bailouts at the same time. And more than a few insiders were granted “waivers” to hold investments in companies that were being rescued by the Fed.

This serves as more evidence that governments only work to protect powerful vested interest groups and would mainly act to preserve the current central bank-banking system-government cartelized political arrangement.

With the US Federal Reserve’s implicit role as the lender of last resort (aside from other financing roles as guarantor, liquidity provider, buyer, market maker and etc…) for most of the ‘too big to fail’ banking system and central banks worldwide, which has been funded mostly by inflationism, the decadence of the US dollar standard is almost assured.