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Trillions in loans are detailed
WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve revealed details Wednesday of trillions of dollars in emergency aid it provided to U.S. and foreign banks during the financial crisis.
Newly released documents show that the most loan money over time went to Citigroup ($2.2 trillion), followed by Merrill Lynch ($2.1 trillion), Morgan Stanley ($2 trillion), Bank of America ($1.1 trillion), Bear Stearns ($960 billion), Goldman Sachs ($620 billion), JPMorgan Chase ($260 billion) and Wells Fargo ($150 billion). Many of the individual loans they took were worth billions and had short durations but were paid back and renewed many times.
Merrill Lynch was later acquired by Bank of America, while Bear Stearns collapsed and was sold to JPMorgan.
Among the largest foreign bank recipients were Bank of England, Swiss National Bank, Barclays and Bank of Japan.
The documents are a reminder of how crippled the financial system had become during the crisis and how much it’s recovered since. Banks earned $14 billion from July through September this year.
The Fed released the data in the form of more than 21,000 transactions. The Fed’s programs were credited with helping restore the health of individual banks and stabilize the financial system.
The documents detail more than $2 trillion the Fed lent through eight programs from December 2007 to July this year to ease a credit crisis. It came at a time when credit had virtually dried up and was worsening the deepest recession since the Great Depression.
The lending programs had never been used before and are now defunct. Most of the loans have been repaid, and none are overdue, Fed officials say.