A $200k MORTGAGE FOR $2.00 A MONTH BY ALLEN GRAYSON

The GAO’s main report on its audit of the Federal Reserve exposed who received the trillions and trillions of dollars in Fed bailouts. But the GAO report wasn’t very specific about the terms of those bailouts. For that, we have the Freedom of Information Act records obtained by Bloomberg News, which Bloomberg wrote about last week. Among other things, Bloomberg reported that the Fed lent out this cash to Wall Street at rates “as low as 0.01 percent.”

To such worthy recipients as Bear Stearns, AIG, the Royal Bank of Scotland, etc., etc.

Well, it could have been worse. The Fed could have just dumped the money into a wood chipper.

If you do that math, you’ll see that when the Fed gave Citigroup the money for a $200,000 mortgage, at 0.01 percent, Citigroup had to pay less than $2 each month for that money. Citigroup then lent that money to you – if it deigned to lend you anything – for maybe $1,000 a month, maybe more.

And that $40,000 credit card balance? Citigroup paid the Fed less than a dollar a month for that money. And you paid $1,000.

Citigroup pays $1. You pay $1,000. You see how that works?

Citigroup fell into such a deep hole that it had to borrow a “term-adjusted” $58,000,000,000 from the Fed, according to Page 132 of the GAO’s audit report.

And what would you get from the Fed, if you fell into a deep hole? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zip. Diddly-squat. Zero.

You wouldn’t get jack.

If you lose your home, you can sleep in your car. If you lose your car, you can sleep under a bridge. Unless, of course, you’re a Wall Street banker.

Two hundred and thirteen years ago, there was a Member of Congress who said: “Millions for defense, but not one penny for tribute.” Now we have a government that says: “Trillions for Wall Street, but not one penny for you.”