User talk:Tgerm

Federal Reserve
As Barek rightly says, that page is for discussion of the article, not general discussion about the Federal Reserve, so I thought I would post some information here.

(1) Calling it a "Secret Bailout" is misleading. Although the details of who got how much money when was kept secret until December 2010, the existence and total balance of the loans was reported by the Federal Reserve all along.

(2) It wasn't a GAO audit that revealed the details of the lending, it was a lawsuit by Bloomberg News, although Congress later mandated even more data be released. Bloomberg has the most informative stories about it online, collected here, including an interactive data visualization tool.

(3) The 16 trillion dollar number is pretty misleading, since it adds up all the loans given out over more than two years even though many of the loans were short term and paid pack in between. The most that was lent out at one time was about $1.2 trillion—still a shockingly high number.

(4) Almost all of the loans have been paid back. You can see a graph of how the balance changed over time in Figure 11 from the GAO report.

(5) The loans were very low interest, but not zero. The Fed reported a profit of $13 billion on the emergency programs.

(6) That first quote from Jefferson is bogus. The others are a mish-mash from different letters of his, out of context and not completely accurate.

—KHirsch (talk) 20:10, 20 October 2011 (UTC)