Saturday, March 29, 2008

Investment Banks Borrowing Billions

Big Wall Street investment companies are taking advantage of the Federal Reserve's unprecedented offer to secure emergency loans, the central bank reported. Investment houses can put up a range of collateral, including investment-grade mortgage backed securities.

The Fed debuted a separate lending facility where Wall Street firms can borrow Treasury securities and put up risky home-loan packages as collateral.

Those firms averaged $32.9 billion in daily borrowing over the past week from the new lending facility, compared with $13.4 billion the previous week. The program, which began last Monday, is part of the Fed's effort to aid the financial system, and the broadest use of the Fed's lending authority since the 1930s.

The Fed also said it would make as much as $200 billion worth of Treasuries available through weekly auctions that started Thursday.

[Excerpt of an article byAP]

Note: A “billion” is a difficult number to comprehend. The next time you hear of loans or debts in the “billions”, or consider how much a billion is.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The Federal Reserve Has Created the Risk of a Global Depression!

Please sign, publish or forward our Abolish the Federal Reserve Petition at
http://www.petitiononline.com/fed/petition.html to all your pro-freedom friends and associates.

The collapsing dollar, exploding oil and food prices, falling housing market, the subprime mortgage and growing credit crisis and stock market weakness are all a result of earlier Federal Reserve actions designed to maximize Wall Street and banking profits at the expense of productive, working people around the world.

Ron Holland, The Swiss Confederation Institute, Wolf Laurel, NC
PS Check out the July Las Vegas FreedomFest Conference www.freedomfest.com