More Evidence That Goldman Sachs Really Runs The U.S. Treasury

Gretchen Morgenson's column, "Secrets Of The Bailout Now Told" starts like this.  Now you can read the rest of it online if you want to dig into the details.  But this should give you the general idea.

"Secrets of the Bailout, Now Told

By GRETCHEN MORGENSON

A  FRESH account emerged last week about the magnitude of financial aid that the Federal Reserve bestowed on big banks during the 2008-09 credit crisis. The report came from Bloomberg News, which had to mount a lengthy legal fight to wrest documents from the Fed that detailed its rescue efforts.
It is dispiriting, of course, that we are still learning about the billions provided to various financial firms during the crisis. Another sad element to this mess is that getting the truth requires the legal firepower of an organization as rich as Bloomberg.
But that’s the way our world works. Billions are secretly showered on troubled financial institutions to stave off disaster. Individuals get little or no help.
Here are some of the new figures:
Among all the rescue programs set up by the Fed, $7.77 trillion in commitments were outstanding as of March 2009, Bloomberg said. The nation’s six largest banks — JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — borrowed almost half a trillion dollars from the Fed at peak periods, Bloomberg calculated, using the central bank’s data.
Those six institutions accounted for 63 percent of the average daily borrowings from the Fed by all publicly traded United States banks, money management and investment firms, Bloomberg said.
Numbers for individual companies were equally astonishing. For example, the Fed provided Bear Stearns with $30 billion to see it through its 2008 shotgun marriage with JPMorgan. This was in addition to the $29.5 billion in assets purchased by the Fed from Bear to assist in the buyout by JPMorgan. Citigroup, meanwhile, tapped the Fed for almost $100 billion in January 2009 — its peak during the crisis — and Morgan Stanley received $107 billion in Fed loans in September 2008."