TRILLIONS: THAT'S WHY THEY CALL US UNCLE SAM

Some say it should be Uncle Sucker.
　
FEDERAL RESERVE REVEALS TRILLIONS DISHED OUT TO WORLD BANKS TO AID FINACIAL CRISIS…. INCLUDING $1.5 TRILLION TO BRITISH BANKS
$3.3trillion handed to financial institutions, $1.25trillion given to help housing market
　
Mail Online
December 2, 2010
　
The Federal Reserve has revealed details of the trillions of dollars it gave in emergency aid to U.S. and foreign banks during the financial crisis.
　
New documents show it paid out a staggering $1.5trillion (almost £1trillion) to British banks - over a third of the total money lent - in an effort to prop up the financial sector.
　
The Fed dished out $2.2trillion to banking giant Citigroup, $2.1trillion to Merrill Lynch and $2trillion to Morgan Stanley.
　
In addition, payments have also be made to Bear Stearns ($960billion), Bank of America ($887billion), Goldman Sachs ($615billion), JPMorgan Chase ($178billion) and Wells Fargo ($154billion).

And foreign banks who benefited from the Fed's aid included European Central Bank, Bank of England and the Bank of Japan as well as Swiss bank UBS, which borrowed more than $165billion, Deutsche Bank ($97billion) and the Royal Bank of Scotland ($92billion).
　
The documents serve as a reminder of how crippled the financial system had become during the crisis and how much it's recovered since.
　
Banks earned $14billion from July through to September this year, showing that the green shoots are definitely showing.

Large non-banking U.S. companies which borrowed from the Federal Reserve included General Electric, who used a total of more than $16billion, Harley-Davidson $2.3billion and a group of independent Caterpillar dealers $733million.
　
In all the Fed disclosed more than 21,000 transactions, totalling $3.3trillion to financial institutions, which was required under the new financial laws.
　
'The system basically failed because banks stopped lending to each other,' said Paul Miller, a banking analyst at FBR Capital Markets.
　
'After Lehman failed ... the Fed essentially opened the floodgates and pushed as much liquidity into the system as possible. And it worked. It helped stabilize the system.'
　
The Fed also detailed the $1.25trillion in mortgage securities it bought from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to help drive down mortgage rates, ease credit and provide some support to the crippled housing market.
　
'There's very much a sense from the data that the Federal Reserve was not just providing liquidity to U.S. banks but was creating stability for the entire world's financial system,' said Linus Wilson, assistant professor of finance at the University of Louisiana, who has studied the financial crisis.