A new article in Bloomberg talks about the biggest banks getting $1.2 trillion in help:
Citigroup Inc. (C) and Bank of America Corp. (BAC) were the reigning champions of finance in 2006 as home prices peaked, leading the 10 biggest U.S. banks and brokerage firms to their best year ever with $104 billion of profits.
By 2008, the housing market’s collapse forced those companies to take more than six times as much, $669 billion, in emergency loans from the U.S. Federal Reserve. The loans dwarfed the $160 billion in public bailouts the top 10 got from the U.S. Treasury, yet until now the full amounts have remained secret.
Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s unprecedented effort to keep the economy from plunging into depression included lending banks and other companies as much as $1.2 trillion of public money, about the same amount U.S. homeowners currently owe on 6.5 million delinquent and foreclosed mortgages. The largest borrower, Morgan Stanley (MS), got as much as $107.3 billion, while Citigroup took $99.5 billion and Bank of America $91.4 billion, according to a Bloomberg News compilation of data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, months of litigation and an act of Congress.
[SNIP]
The $1.2 trillion peak on Dec. 5, 2008 — the combined outstanding balance under the seven programs tallied by Bloomberg — was almost three times the size of the U.S. federal budget deficit that year and more than the total earnings of all federally insured banks in the U.S. for the decade through 2010, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
2008 – now who was President then? Oh yeah – George Bush. Barack Obama didn’t become President until January 20, 2009, yet if you bring up this simplest of fact to anyone on the right, you are quickly called a “Bush basher”. As matter of fact we have right wing bloggers saying this is why we need more Republicans:
This new burst of wealth creation will not begin until we elect a GOP Senate and a GOP President.
I really didn’t know 2 year olds could blog, because the only ones who can truly believe that TARP was a Democrat only measure must not have been alive in 2008. Apparently they forget unprecedented acts like the Presidential candidate for a major party in the U.S. suspending their campaign to help devise TARP. Who has that candidate?
Oh – that would be Republican candidate John McCain! But if you ask other’s on the right, like John Hinderaker, that never happened. Here’s what he wrote not even two years after this historical event:
Neither President Bush nor President Obama had the power to “enact” legislation. In fact, TARP I was enacted by the Democratic Congress (including Senator Obama, who voted for it) during the last days of the Bush administration.
Again – fact is an extinct item when it comes to these people. First off TARP was passed on Oct. 1, 2008 and signed into law by President Bush on Oct. 3, 2008. That was 109 days before Bush left office. Bush still had a veto pen and could have used it, but that might have been hard considering the number of votes TARP got in both chambers.
And speaking of votes, Hinderaker talks about Obama voting for TARP, yet he fails to mention that Senator John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, also voted for the bill, along with 33 other members of his party. Let’s remember that in 2008 the Senate was close to evenly divided, with Democrats controlling only 51 seats. In the end only 15 Republicans voted against TARP and 9 Democrats, including one Independent who caucuses with the left, voted against it.
The House was more divided. There the bill passed 268-148, with 145 Republicans voting against along with only 3 Democrats, but the fact remains that this bill was largely bi-partisan and was authored in a bi-partisan fashion, with the help of President Bush, Candidate Obama and Candidate McCain.
But something else interesting happened last year. While the right was trying to redo our history and make Barack Obama President in 2008, the actual President from that time came out, thumping his chest and saying that he prevented the next Great Depression. That was in an interview with Oprah last fall. You can watch the actual video here (I would have embedded it, but it was disabled on this video).
So now we have Bush admitting he brought TARP and that gives the right something else to brag about:
George Bush, President at the time, has written about the situation he found himself in, with every economic adviser telling him that the world faced another Great Depression if international banks were not supported (or bailed out) by the United States government. But, as I understand it, that was a separate and smaller matter. I believe his administration had to approve only the much smaller loans or guarantees by the Treasury Department, not the trillion dollar-plus loans from the Fed.
That blogger there is again John Hinderaker. He is talking about the $1.2 trillion I talked about at the beginning of this post – that $1.2 trillion that went to the banks under President Bush! Reading this, Hinderaker is saying that smaller loans were only needed, like those supplied by TARP, not the $1.2 trillion given in secret loans by the Bush treasury department. Of course Hinderaker is using this as some sort of praise to Bush.
Got whiplash? I know I do!
This is a prime example of what is wrong with America today. We have to many of the electorate that ignores fact and wants to do nothing but play a partisan blame game. They can’t accept simple facts like Bush being President when the economy went to hell in a hand basket, so they will rewrite history in their mind and change the inauguration date of the President – a date that already passed!
Of course I don’t blame the electorate fully for this. Instead I blame people like Hinderaker and FOX news. They are the ones who have been pushing this alternate reality. They are the ones who have been saying for the past 2 1/2 years that the economic problems all happened under Obama. As soon as someone tries to correct them, they go on the defensive and accuse the person with the actual facts of BDS (Bush Deraignment Syndrome). Add to that the fact that Americans are quick to believe what they hear and don’t have time to research facts, we are stuck with a voting public that reminds me of the rat in the cage. They will quickly ring that bell in order to get the cheese, even if getting that cheese will lead them to harm’s way.
For many Republicans, the Republican is always right and the Democrat is always wrong. The same can be said on the left. Until we have an electorate that can say “hey – both sides caused this”, our problems will continue.
Yes I have been bashing the right in this post, but I have also seen many on the left try to say that the Democrats are absolved from any responsibility in the economic crash. To those people I say check out Chris Dodd and Barney Frank. Also check out the de-regulation of the banking industry that happened under President Clinton. This was the removal of the very regulations that were enacted after the Great Depression to prevent a repeat.
Until Americans turn off the 24-hour opinion news channels and stop listening to talk radio, they will not think on their own. We will continue to elect leaders who either believe in these falsehoods or want to reinforce them. That means our problems will continue to plague us and our once great country will continue on this downward spiral.
Perhaps next fall every voter should be asked one simple question – who was President in the fall of 2008. If they can’t answer that then they can’t vote. Simply put, we need a thinking America again – not the rats in the cage.