A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid, details suggest taxpayers paid a price that included secret funding that helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger, writes Bloomberg.
A Bloomberg interactive graphic identifying by exactly how much individual banks profited from the Fed loans is here.
The scale of that chart is very misleading. For example, my old bank, KeyCorp, is listed as having made $152 million, and Citigroup is listed as having made $1.8 billion. However, because of the scale, the chart visually shows that Citigroup made only about twice as much as KeyCorp, when in reality they made almost TWELVE times as much.
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