Dear Friend and Reader,
DO YA’LL REMEMBER those images from the early days of the glorious Iraqi liberation? You know the ones where Iraqis were seen walking into their banks and grabbing anything they could? Or the stories of Saddam Jr. pulling up to the treasury with three tractor trailers to haul off 900 million dollars in tidy stacks of 100 dollar bills?
Seems as if the Bush Administration and their friends have taken a page from the Hussein family playbook.
While we all wait to see how the 700 billion dollar bailout package will trickle down to our pocketbooks, the Federal Reserve Bank has been quietly cutting deals to the tune of nearly two trillion dollars with banking groups like Citigroup and Goldman Sachs — twice the size of the better known bailout deal. Who else got this federal money, and what collateral was provided for those loans is what Bloomberg News wants to know.
According to Bloomberg News, the Federal Treasury has been issuing emergency loans to American banks long before Wall Street and AIG bellied up to the cash bar. Since May of this year Bloomberg has sought information about these loans, but the government has disclosed few details of the loans. Until now, the media has given little attention to the Reserve plan, but that should soon change. Reporters are beginning to ask questions about the supposed transparency of the better known bailout, but the opacity of those answers won’t remotely compare to the wall of secrecy they’ll encounter when they begin to ask questions about the larger Reserve handout.