Imagine that your family had $250,000 saved and thieves took it. But the legal system, more aligned with the thieves than with you, didn't care to help you. Actually that just happened. Everyone who was unemployed could have been given a job. A vast public works program could have created to stimulate the economy. This money would then have been an investment in the country & its people, instead of a one-time gift to banks.

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Thanks to heroic efforts of Congressman Ron Paul, former Congressman Alan Grayson and Congressman Bernie Sanders to audit the Federal Reserve, we now know that the Federal Reserve secretly lent out $26 trillion worth of American money from 2007 to 2010 -- much of it to foreign banks.  

       

Twenty.   Six.   TRILLION.   Dollars.

This is a very difficult number to comprehend -- but we now have a way to wrap our minds around it.

At his website usdebt.kleptocracy.us, Los Angeles-based 3D designer Oto Godfrey has created an incredibly powerful series of images to help us actually visualize this much money, were it to be assembled out of brick-sized stacks of 100-dollar bills.   And this website goes into more detail about each category of the loan making. 

Fifteen trillion dollars -- or one year's worth of the US National Debt -- is a stack of hundred-dollar bills that is longer and wider than a football field . . and over 2/3rds the height of the Statue of Liberty.

If you add another $11 Trillion to get our total of $26 Trillion, that same stack, covering an entire football field, will now be taller than the Statue of Liberty.  

In the Face of This, Congressman Grayson Spoke the Terrible Truth

Here is a small part of the letter in which Congressman Grayson reveals how he found this startling number, 26 trillion, in the newly-audited Federal Reserve balance sheets.

Congressman Grayson:   " I wouldn't want anyone to think that I'm dramatizing or amplifying what this GAO report says, so I'm just going to quote some of my favorite parts, by page number."

Page 131 -- The total lending for the Fed's "broad-based emergency programs" was $16.1trillion.   The four largest recipients, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Bank of America, received more than a trillion dollars each!

The 5^th-largest recipient was Barclays PLC.   The 8th was the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, PLC.   The 9th was Deutsche Bank AG.   The 10th was UBS AG.   These four institutions each got between a quarter of a trillion and a trillion dollars.   None of them is an American bank.

Page 205 -- Separate and apart from these "broad-based emergency program" loans were another $10 trillion in "currency swaps."   In these "currency swaps," the Fed handed dollars to foreign central banks, no strings attached, to fund bailouts in other countries".

These currency swaps and the "broad-based emergency program" loans, together totaled more than $26 trillion.   That's almost $100,000 for every man, woman, and child in America!   It's also an amount equal to more than seven years of federal spending -- spending on the military, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, interest on the debt, and everything else.   And around twice America's total GNP.

So keep this question in mind:   If the Fed had extended $26 trillion in credit to the American people instead of Wall Street, would there now be 24 million Americans who are either unemployed or unable to find a full-time job?   Answer:   No, of course not!

The results of this audit were first published on the morning of July 21, 2011.   At first, the most obvious number that jumped out from the report was "only" 16 trillion.   You have to add in the ten trillion in (derivative) "currency swaps" to reach the full 26-trillion-dollar mark.   So let's conservatively stick with the initial figure of 16 trillion for now, as there are very few articles on this subject -- and most of them quote that particular number.

This next article from Unelected.org clearly reveals the breadth and depth of the fully justified outrage there would surely be if more people knew about this massive theft.

The results of the first audit in the Federal Reserve's nearly 100-year history were recently posted on Senator Bernie Sanders' webpage.   What was revealed about the audit, by Senator Sanders, was once again startling by way of its confirmation that $16 trillion had indeed been secretly given out to US banks and corporations, and foreign banks everywhere from France to Scotland.   So there is no escaping it:   In the period between December 2007 and June 2010, the Federal Reserve 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.   This was, therefore, a gift -- as well as a form of theft, from the American people, who will for the foreseeable future be paying interest on much of this borrowed money.

Why the Federal Reserve has never been public about this, and never 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 millions of middle-class Americans were rapidly falling into poverty or near poverty, as they struggled to find jobs that increasingly were no longer there!

So how much good could this 16 trillion dollars have done if it had been redirected into the United States economy, on behalf of the people -- rather than be used to reward the banks and financial institutions that triggered the financial and economic collapse in the first place?

Let's continue with the article from Unelected.org to reveal the following facts:

To place $16 trillion into perspective, remember that the GDP of the United States is only $14.1 trillion.   Also keep in mind that t he entire national debt of the United States government, after 200+ years of spending, is "only" $14.5 trillion.   Finally, remember that t he budget that is being debated so heavily in Congress and the Senate is, by comparison, "only" $3.5 trillion.

So, keeping in mind all the outrage and debate over the $1.5 trillion deficit, try to swallow this very difficult pill:   There was no debate whatsoever about whether $16 trillion would be given to failing banks and failing corporations and governments around the world.

In late 2008, the TARP Bailout bill was passed -- and loans "totaling" $800 billion were reportedly given to failing banks and companies.   But that was a blatant lie -- considering the fact that Goldman Sachs alone received $814 billion.  

As it turns out, the Federal Reserve also 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.   So why did our government lie to us about this?!

Why?   Because, once again, the initial figure of 16 trillion that jumps out of the Federal Reserve audit is more money than all the goods and services produced by every single person in the United States for any given year.   As pointed out earlier, it is also greater than the entire amount of debt ever racked up by the United States in its 235-year history.   This needs to be kept in mind front and center, and for that reason deserves reiteration.  

The 2010 Census estimated there are 114,825,428 households in the US.   Sixteen trillion dollars in secret bailouts adds up to $139,342 per household.

However, the full figure of $26 trillion adds up to nearly a quarter million dollars per household -- $226,430 to be exact.

When you put it in those terms, the full weight of this gargantuan theft becomes nothing short of staggering.  

Imagine that your family had a quarter million dollars saved, and then some thieves took it from you.   What if the thieves then admitted what they did -- but the police and the legal system, more aligned with the thieves than with you, didn't care to help you do anything about it?   Yet that's what just happened to every single family in the United States!  

Every single adult in the United States who was unemployed or on public assistance could have been given a job -- so that they could lead happy, fulfilling and prosperous lives -- with plenty of money to spare.   How so?   A vast public works program could easily have been created to stimulate the economy.   This money would then have become an investment in the country and its people, instead of a one-time gift to banks, foreign governments and big corporations.

What Jobs Could We Have Created?

We could have restored our crumbling roads, sewers, gas mains and bridges, the most decrepit in the industrialized world.

We could have transformed poverty-stricken inner cities by means of massive construction and refurbishing projects, and dramatically improved public transportation -- making it much easier for people to get to work and back, thereby greatly expanding the number of job opportunities available to them.

We could have completely modernized public schools, halved the size of classes, improved the pay and quality of teachers, and provided enough computers for every kid in the country.

We could have trained and hired enough teachers to educate vastly more of our children in the skills and software needed to be competitive in today's rapidly evolving economy.

We could have boldly invested in clean energy technologies to heal the environment -- as China is now doing, with half a trillion dollars in spending every year.

We could have built high-speed bullet trains to make it easier (and faster) when traveling through and between congested urban areas.

And, as Foster Gamble revealed in his groundbreaking independent film Thrive, we could have ended poverty and environmental destruction -- for as little as $200 billion a year.

But instead of any of this happening, the "one percent" got to upgrade their already lavish lifestyles -- while much of the middle class was forced to sink ever deeper into the Next Great Depression, as economist Paul Krugman recently called it.

Congressman Bernie Sanders Helps Strip Away The Lies

In early November, Congressman Bernie Sanders revealed that in addition to handing out $16 trillion (not counting the ten trillion in "currency swaps" that Congressman Grayson pointed out), the Federal Reserve also owns the financial agencies they are supposed to be regulating.

A GAO audit referenced by Sanders revealed that many of the people who serve as directors of the 12 Federal Reserve Banks come from the exact same financial institutions that the Fed is in charge of regulating!   Further, the GAO found that at least 18 current and former Fed board members were affiliated with banks and companies that received emergency loans from the Federal Reserve during the financial crisis.   In other words, the people "regulating" the banks were the exact same people who were being "regulated."   For example, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase served on the New York Fed's board of directors at the same time that his bank received more than $390 billion in financial assistance from the Fed.

Getting this type of disclosure was not easy because Wall Street and the Federal Reserve fought it every step of the way.   But, as difficult as it was to lift the veil of secrecy at the Fed, it will be even harder to reform the Fed so that it serves the needs of all Americans, and not just Wall Street.   Yet that is exactly what we must do.

Mainstream Media Lies Re: The Real Size Of The Bailouts

To sum up, we've so far seen that the Federal Reserve secretly created $26 trillion (out of thin air), without US government approval.   This adds up to nearly a quarter million dollars per American household.

This money, as stated at the outset, was then handed out to financial institutions like Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, the Royal Bank of Scotland and Deutsche Bank.

Then, lying mainstream media journalist-presstitutes reported that the entire bailout added up to nothing more than $1.2 trillion.   They also said that "this is what a central bank is supposed to do."

But add up all the emergency loans the Federal Reserve distributed to banks between 2007 and 2009 (when the American economy lurched closer to collapse than anyone had previously thought possible) and it represents a much larger pile of money.

Bloomberg News recently made available the fullest version yet of its data on Fed emergency lending , a subject this news organization has written about numerous times in the past year.   The Bloomberg release includes records of about 50,000 transactions the Fed made through seven different financial mechanisms.

At their peak, these seven programs represented $1.2 trillion in loans to banks and financial institutions -- the alleged high-water mark of a massive, systemic bailout whose details the country's central banking authority was, now quite understandably, very reluctant to divulge.

Even as critics have nailed the Fed for being less than forthcoming, few people claim that the central bank did the wrong thing by stepping in to backstop a financial system that seemed to be on the verge of imploding:   "In the middle of the financial crisis, this is what you need.   This is what a central bank is supposed to do," said James Wilcox, a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.

However, the utterly fake figures of $1.2 trillion and $7.7 trillion were both refuted on December 13th, 2011 by economist L. Randall Wray, who said the actual number is a full-on $29 Trillion.

Therefore the true total of Federal Reserve emergency lending to Wall Street is not the presstitute-reported $1.2 trillion, as Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke contends, nor the $7.7 trillion figure reported by Bloomberg News, which Bernanke publicly contests.   The real number, says economist L. Randall Wray, is a staggering $29 trillion.   Wray writes that Bernanke's recent defense of the lower figure is "misleading" and that the chairman's claim that Fed bailouts do not constitute a form of spending is plain wrong.

So, Was the 26-To-29 Trillion Dollars Enough To Solve the Main Financial Problem Facing This Country?

There is simply no justifiable explanation for why this much money was needed.   As we have seen, it had nothing to do with securing the assets of, or in any way benefitting, ordinary Americans.

But was this enough money to rescue banking institutions and restore them to full and lasting health?   Or, did it merely keep them on life support a little longer, while greatly enriching senior bank officers and corporate CEOs, and also providing them with hundreds of billions of additional dollars with which to gamble in the derivatives market?

The answer is shocking.   The $26 trillion was little more than a temporary gasp for air by companies that are still drowning in debt but which continue to gamble recklessly in the derivatives market.

Thanks to deregulation, such as the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act, these institutions were allowed to hold just one dollar in the bank while they gambled in the derivatives market as if they had 5, 10, or even 30 dollars to backstop every hundred dollars of loans and gambling.

To put it into a kind of personal perspective, if you had ten thousand dollars in your checking account, you would suddenly become a millionaire if you could leverage it (borrow additional funds at 0% interest) at the "100X" rate for each dollar in your account.

Conclusion:   These financial institutions have manipulated and abused "the system" in a way that allowed them to do casino gambling on a global scale -- with hundreds of billions of dollars of public money.   And this reckless gambling, with public money, continues to this day.

Reference article from which most of the statistics, reasoning and links in this article were taken.  

Authors Bio:

Several years after receiving my M.A. in social science (interdisciplinary studies) I was an instructor at S.F. State University for a year, but then went back to designing automated machinery, and then tech writing, in Silicon Valley. I've always been more interested in political economics and what's going on behind the scenes in politics, than in mechanical engineering, and because of that I've rarely worked more than 8 months a year, devoting much of the rest of the year to reading and writing about that which interests me most.