The Federal Reserve's 'Breathtaking' $7.7 Trillion Bank Bailout

A new report on the 2008 financial crisis reveals some shocking numbers that dramatically exceed the $700 billion TARP bailout

A new report by Bloomberg Markets Magazine details trillions of dollars in secret federal loans made to the big banks during the 2008 financial crisis, a process that helped them rake in billions of dollars in undisclosed profits. Here, some key numbers that illuminate the Federal Reserve’s “breathtaking” $7.7 trillion bank bailout:

29,000
Pages of federal documents, courtesy of the Freedom of Information Act, and central bank records that Bloomberg combed through to reveal a “fresh narrative of the financial crisis”

More than 21,000
Number of transactions detailed in those pages

$7.7 trillion
Amount in undisclosed loans the Federal Reserve made to struggling financial institutions, according to the new Bloomberg report. That “dwarf[s] the Treasury Department’s better-known $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program [TARP],” say Bob Ivry, Bradley Keoun, and Phil Kuntz at Bloomberg

$13 billion
Estimated amount in previously undisclosed profits the six largest banks — JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs Group, and Morgan Stanley — took in, thanks to those loans and the Fed’s below-market rates. Unlike the TARP funds, “the loans came with virtually no strings attached for the banks,” says Travis Waldron at Think Progress

$160 billion
Amount in TARP funds the big six received

As much as $460 billion
Amount the big six borrowed from the Fed, as calculated by Bloomberg and measured by peak daily debt

$1.2 trillion
Amount that banks referenced in the new report required on Dec. 5, 2008, “their single neediest day.” The Federal Reserve didn’t reveal to anyone which banks were in such dire need, say Ivry, Keoun, and Kuntz, and “bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy.”

$86 billion
Amount that Bank of America Corp. owed the central bank when then-CEO Kenneth D. Lewis wrote shareholders saying that he was at the helm of “one of the strongest and most stable banks in the world” on Nov. 26, 2008

$107 billion
Amount in secret loans that Morgan Stanley took in a single month, in September 2008

1 out of 10
Share of the country’s delinquent mortgages that amount could have paid off

$6.8 trillion
Total assets held by the big six on Sept. 30, 2006

$9.5 trillion
Total held on Sept. 20, 2011. Rather than help curb the practice that caused the financial crisis, “the Fed and its secret financing helped America’s biggest financial firms get bigger and go on to pay employees as much as they did at the height of the housing bubble,” say Ivry, Keoun, and Kuntz

Sources: Bloomberg, Business Insider, Think Progress