posted July 28, 2011 04:52 PM            

The first ever GAO(Government Accountability Office) audit of the Federal Reserve was carried out in the past few months due to the Ron Paul, Alan Grayson Amendment to the Dodd-Frank bill, which passed last year. Jim DeMint, a Republican Senator, and Bernie Sanders, an independent Senator, led the charge for a Federal Reserve audit in the Senate, but watered down the original language of the house bill(HR1207), so that a complete audit would not be carried out. Ben Bernanke(pictured to the left), Alan Greenspan, and various other bankers vehemently opposed the audit and lied to Congress about the effects an audit would have on markets. Nevertheless, the results of the first audit in the Federal Reserve’s nearly 100 year history were posted on Senator Sander’s webpage earlier this morning.

What was revealed in the audit was startling: $16,000,000,000,000.00 had been secretly given out to US banks and corporations and foreign banks everywhere from France to Scotland. From the period between December 2007 and June 2010, the Federal Reserve had secretly bailed out many of the world’s banks, corporations, and governments. The Federal Reserve likes to refer to these secret bailouts as an all-inclusive loan program, but virtually none of the money has been returned and it was loaned out at 0% interest. Why the Federal Reserve had never been public about this or even informed the United States Congress about the $16 trillion dollar bailout is obvious — the American public would have been outraged to find out that the Federal Reserve bailed out foreign banks while Americans were struggling to find jobs.

To place $16 trillion into perspective, remember that GDP of the United States is only $14.12 trillion. The entire national debt of the United States government spanning its 200+ year history is “only” $14.5 trillion. The budget that is being debated so heavily in Congress and the Senate is “only” $3.5 trillion. Take all of the outrage and debate over the $1.5 trillion deficit into consideration, and swallow this Red pill: There was no debate about whether $16,000,000,000,000 would be given to failing banks and failing corporations around the world.

In late 2008, the TARP Bailout bill was passed and loans of $800 billion were given to failing banks and companies. That was a blatant lie considering the fact that Goldman Sachs alone received 814 billion dollars. As is turns out, the Federal Reserve donated $2.5 trillion to Citigroup, while Morgan Stanley received $2.04 trillion. The Royal Bank of Scotland and Deutsche Bank, a German bank, split about a trillion and numerous other banks received hefty chunks of the $16 trillion.

some of the payouts:

Citigroup: $2.5 trillion ($2,500,000,000,000)
Morgan Stanley: $2.04 trillion ($2,040,000,000,000)
Merrill Lynch: $1.949 trillion ($1,949,000,000,000)
Bank of America: $1.344 trillion ($1,344,000,000,000)
Barclays PLC (United Kingdom): $868 billion ($868,000,000,000)
Bear Sterns: $853 billion ($853,000,000,000)
Goldman Sachs: $814 billion ($814,000,000,000)
Royal Bank of Scotland (UK): $541 billion ($541,000,000,000)
JP Morgan Chase: $391 billion ($391,000,000,000)
Deutsche Bank (Germany): $354 billion ($354,000,000,000)
UBS (Switzerland): $287 billion ($287,000,000,000)
Credit Suisse (Switzerland): $262 billion ($262,000,000,000)
Lehman Brothers: $183 billion ($183,000,000,000)
Bank of Scotland (United Kingdom): $181 billion ($181,000,000,000)
BNP Paribas (France): $175 billion ($175,000,000,000)
and many many more including banks in Belgium of all places

posted July 29, 2011 02:28 PM            

thanks for posting that! I thought the audit was stalled.

16 Trillion??? I would never have imagined that much, I figured a few trillion.

Has this been circulated widely? As in the front page of all print and ISP's no, funny about that. I remember Bernie Sanders talking about it a couple years ago....

swallow the red pill? with 0% interest? Yikes, the poo is going to hit the fan.

Good old uranus/ pluto.

posted July 29, 2011 02:59 PM            

posted on your site:
US Treasury has invited 20 of the biggest banks to the NY Fed to discuss debt ceiling related issues in a closed door meeting today.

4 hours ago via web

there were many closed door meetings today. way too many. All of this crap should be on cspan.

____________________

posted July 31, 2011 06:57 PM            

We more than scratched their backs, we gave them the full spa treatment__ thanks to the FED__ so why is turn around not an option?

If 16 trillion was do-able, surely a measly 6-8 trill is an amuse buche.

Oh and I categorically deny that I post too many charts:

FIRE!

posted July 31, 2011 10:49 PM            

There's some people in the White House who can't count...and it's showing up everywhere, including their charts.

posted August 02, 2011 08:33 AM            

President Obama has suggested in his last 147 television appearances that he inherited the national debt from President Bush, who squandered the Clinton surplus with his "tax cuts for the rich" and his unnecessary wars.

Now someone at whitehouse.gov, apparently not an accountant or an economist, has put together an "infographic" that assigns hard numbers to these vague assertions, explaining in detail how "$12.7 Trillion [was] Added to the Debt Over the Last Decade." The graphic parts of the infographic are competent, and the White House logo looks spiffy, but the info part is entirely mendacious.

The infographic is a vertical bar graph with 2 segments that stand out: "Bush Policies," highlighted in red ink, are responsible for $7 trillion, while "Obama policies," in blue, added $1.4 trillion to the national debt. We are therefore led to believe that Bush added five times as much as Obama to the national debt.

Bush's $7 trillion comes from 6 items, which include -- predictably -- "$3T - Bush tax cuts" and "$1.4T - Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq," while Obama's $1.4 trillion is the sum of four random line items:

$400B - One-time emergency cost and investments (ex: small business bill, HIRE Act, education investments, and Census);

$250B - December 2010 middle class tax cut deal;

$800B - Recovery Act

$400B - Additional mandatory policies (e.g. Farm Bill)

The items have obviously been slanted to favor Obama's policies (the "middle class tax cut deal" is no different from the "Bush tax cuts"; Obama has "education investments," "one-time and emergency cost[s]" and "mandatory policies" while Bush was fighting un-mandatory wars, etc.).

But more striking is Obama's childish conception of the national debt. To state what might be obvious: the federal government takes in revenue and spends it on all its various discretionary activities and mandatory entitlements. When outlays exceed receipts, we run a deficit, and over time, the deficits accumulate, creating national debt, which today stands at $14.2 trillion and running.

Any government expenditure could potentially add to the national debt, but the idea that you can point to one "policy" and claim that 100% of the cost should be added to our debt is absurd. It would be like claiming that you gained ten pounds because last month you ate six pounds of chicken and four pounds of rice. Similarly, it is erroneous to claim that that the national debt increased by $1.4 trillion because Bush spent that amount over five years on Iraq and Afghanistan. Much, or part, of the cost of war was funded by tax revenue.

Obama's 2010 budget was over 2,000 pages long, with $3.5 trillion of expenditures, against $2.1 trillion in revenue, resulting in a deficit of $1.4 trillion for one year alone. None of this spending appears in the infographic, even though the combined budgets of Department of Education, HUD, and the Department of Energy total over $100 billion a year, or over $1 trillion in the last decade. It's as if Obama has redefined mandatory and discretionary spending; any statist program he believes in is mandatory, while programs he disapproves of are discretionary, and only these latter programs can add to the national debt.

As for the Bush tax cuts: Obama has repeatedly referred to tax cuts as government spending, as if cutting taxes deprives the government of its rightful due. He doesn't see lower taxes as taking less of taxpayers' own money away, but as giving back some of the money the government was owed. It's an odiously statist way of looking at government. Tax rates have been adjusted regularly throughout history in an effort to find efficient levels that allow us to pay for necessary services without adding a crushing burden that discourages entrepreneurship. A tax cut establishes a new level of taxation; it is not an aberration from some original, true rate.

Furthermore, cutting taxes often stimulates economic activity, which brings increased rather than decreased revenue. And if lower taxes do lead to lower revenues, it is entirely legitimate for taxpayers to choose a smaller government model where they pay less in taxes and receive less in government services.

One might notice that Obama's $12.7-trillion figure doesn't match the OMB's $14 trillion. The infographic starts with the following assumption:

At the end of the Clinton Administration in 2001, the United States was on track to pay off its debt and accumulate +2.3 trillion in savings by 2011. The past ten years drastically changed that, beginning with President Bush's tax cuts and ending with a 2011 total public debt of -$10.4 trillion-a swing of -$12.7 trillion.

Obama arrived at this $2.3-trillion figure by taking the one-year surplus in 2000 of $236 billion and extrapolating it out over the next ten years. This fairy tale assumes a static economic model, with no high-tech bubble, no 9/11 attacks, no normal fluctuations of the business cycle, no Iraq Wars, no Hurricane Katrinas.

The numbers outside whitehouse.gov, i.e., in the real world that the Office of Management and Budget attempts to capture, tell a different story. Here are the federal deficits over the past decade:

see chart at site http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/08/obamas_idiotic_infographic.html

Surplus/Deficit (billions)

2001 128,236
Final Clinton appropriations bill

2002 -157,758
First Bush appropriations bill

2003 -377,585
Declining tax receipts; Iraq War

2004 -412,727


2005 -318,346


2006 -248,181


2007 -160,701


2008 -458,553
First budget under Reid-Pelosi Congress

2009 -1,412,688
First Obama budget; receipts drop $400B, outlays +$600B

2010 -1,293,489


2011 -1,645,119

It's hard to ignore the huge spending increase under the Pelosi-Reid Congress in their first budget (submitted in 2007 for FY 2008), and the skyrocketing deficits once Obama took the reins.

When Bush signed his first appropriations bill for FY 2002, the nation had accumulated a debt of $6.2 trillion. In 2009, the last year under a budget signed by Bush, the national debt was $11.9 trillion, or an increase of $5.7 trillion, of which $1.8 trillion, or nearly a third of the increase, occurred in 2009, during Obama's presidency but under a Bush appropriations bill. If we look at the OMB numbers for Bush's deficits, we see that during from 2002-2009, receipts were $17.2 trillion vs. outlays of $20.8 trillion, a deficit of $3.5 trillion. The difference between $5.7 and $3.5 trillion lies in accounting gimmicks that separate "Debt Held by Federal Government Accounts" (the so-called Social Security Trust Fund, et. al) and various on-budget and off-budget categories. Bush's record was not good, but to attribute $7 trillion to Bush is simply false.

Similarly, Obama policies have added far more than $1.4 trillion. National debt has risen from $11.9 trillion in 2009 to $14.2 trillion (July 2011), an increase of $2.3 trillion in two and a half years. The really scary number is the CBO estimate for 2016: a debt of $20.8 trillion, assuming that Obama is reelected.

It is discouraging but not unexpected to see politicians manipulate financial statistics for political gain. More frightening is the thought that Obama might actually believe that his infographic is an accurate portrayal of our financial situation. Does the former community organizer have a clue?
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/08/obamas_idiotic_infographic.html

posted August 02, 2011 12:14 PM            

quote:

---

Any government expenditure could potentially add to the national debt, but the idea that you can point to one "policy" and claim that 100% of the cost should be added to our debt is absurd. It would be like claiming that you gained ten pounds because last month you ate six pounds of chicken and four pounds of rice. Similarly, it is erroneous to claim that that the national debt increased by $1.4 trillion because Bush spent that amount over five years on Iraq and Afghanistan. Much, or part, of the cost of war was funded by tax revenue.

---

posted August 02, 2011 04:22 PM            

quote:

---

President Obama has suggested in his last 147 television appearances that he inherited the national debt from President Bush, who squandered the Clinton surplus with his "tax cuts for the rich" and his unnecessary wars.

---

#1__Obama mentioned his inheritance in every single one of those 147 appearances?? Seems Pete would like us to think so. He would also like us to think that Bush2 did not squander it. which is patently false. I don't want to get into a Bush2 bashing/debate. We all know where that will lead. However it is worth mentioning that as of late 2007 repubs were storming the aisles in the fast track to disassociate themselves from Walker Bush. Shoot, they didn't even sell any memorabilia at any of the 2008 RNC conventions, and if they did they were in the back under a table and you had to ask "got any GWB memorabilia? I would like to celebrate a successful 2 terms as President!" NOT.

Further; pick a bone at this billion, or those billions, the fact remains that using the frame ploy that Obama created the debts is also patently false.

quote:

---

It's hard to ignore the huge spending increase under the Pelosi-Reid Congress in their first budget (submitted in 2007 for FY 2008), and the skyrocketing deficits once Obama took the reins.

---

Horse Hockey- What is hard to ignore is that Republican Conservatives have driven up the debt 3 fold [it's actually more than that] over Democratic Presidents. And Bush2 did tally in at over 5 trillion in debt to claim otherwise is also patently false.

I do not want to see this thread relegated to more posturing. We already have mucho threads devoted to this topic.

Yes, I am the one that posted a debt chart that perhaps belonged elsewhere, my reasoning was that our economy needs bailing out. *Revenues* from the big three-- for americans are not forth coming, but the FED, part of our govt has seen fit to bail out banks world wide, racking up trillions. The money is quite obviously there, our needs are being superseded.

What Kat posted is staggering, care to weigh in on the topic of our FED bailing out the Global banks that were and are hip to hip and in fact are our Banks??

posted August 03, 2011 09:42 AM            

It's always someone elses fault. Thus the phony chart in which the numbers don't add up.

It is patently absurd to load all military spending into the cost of the war(s). It's like saying...we had no military bases, military personnel, military training expenses, no rifles, no tanks, no planes, no ships, no nothing...so we can claim all those costs are a direct result of the war(s).

posted August 03, 2011 11:27 AM            

yes we have expenses in the military in peace time (anyone remember that quaint concept?) but when we are at war those expenses shoot up and to pretend otherwise is RIDICULOUS.