The Street Loots the Treasury, and Runs over the Poor

WHile Wall Street and other major firms looted the country's Treasury and enriched themselves with fat bonuses, the BOWLES AND SIMPSON "Catfood"Commission recommends reducing social and medical benefits. These reductions are designed to hurt the poor, disproportionately.

Money For Nothing: Wall Street Borrowed From Fed At 0.0078 Percent: "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"

Fed aid in financial crisis went beyond U.S. banks to industry, foreign firms: "The Fed's efforts to prop up the financial sector extended to stalwarts of American industry including General Electric and Caterpillar and household-name companies such as Verizon, Harley-Davidson and Toyota. The central bank also helped U.S. subsidiaries of banks based in East Asia, Europe and Canada while rescuing money-market mutual funds held by millions of Americans.

The biggest users of the Fed lending programs were some of the world's largest banks, including Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Swiss-based UBS and Britain's Barclays, according to more than 21,000 loan records released Wednesday under new financial regulatory legislation.

The data reveal banks turning to the Fed for help almost daily in the fall of 2008 as the central bank lowered lending standards and extended relief to all kinds of institutions it had never assisted before."

Wall Street Dares to Indulge Itself Again - NYTimes.com: "This despite the fact that bonuses on Wall Street are not likely to be up much from last year, though they will still be strong. Over all, Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase have set aside $89.54 billion this year to pay employees, 2.8 percent less than a year ago, according to data from Nomura.

....n the years leading up to the credit crisis some executives became famous for their expenditures, like L. Dennis Kozlowski, the former chief executive of Tyco International, whose $6,000 shower curtain became a symbol of unnecessary extravagance.

Some of that excess remains. A Morgan Stanley trader recently tried to hire a dwarf for a bachelor party in Miami, asking the dwarf to meet him at the airport in a “Men in Black” style suit, according to e-mail exchanges. ..."