Fed Data Reveals Morgan Stanley as Top Borrower

Bloomberg News sorted through more than 29,000 pages of previously secret documents and Fed spreadsheets detailing more than 21,000 loans to compile a database showing which companies got the emergency liquidity and when.  The combined outstanding balance under the seven programs tallied by Bloomberg peaked at $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, about three times the size of the U.S. federal budget deficit that year and a third more than the total earnings of all federally insured banks in the U.S. Read the full story here: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-21/wall-street-aristocracy-got-1-2-trillion-in-fed-s-secret-loans.html

Bberg has also created a data visualization tool that allows you to slice-and-dice all of the loan program information. You can see an overview of the borrowing totals, compare specific banks, sort by country or industry and much more using easy-to-read graphs and charts. The tool also includes bullets on company graph pages that highlight public statements made by company executives at the time that they were borrowing billions in public money. The interactive web tool is available at: http://bloom.bg/FedData

Data compiled by Bloomberg News shows:

• Morgan Stanley’s Fed borrowing peaked at $107.3 billion, the highest outstanding balance of any company during the crisis and almost three times the company’s profits over the past decade.
• The three biggest borrowers—Morgan Stanley (MS), Citigroup (C) and Bank of America (BAC)—combined for $298.2 billion in hidden Fed loans which was triple what they received in publicly-disclosed bailouts from the U.S. Treasury. Until now, after months of litigation and an act of Congress, neither investors nor the American public knew the extent of their borrowing.
• Almost half of the Fed’s top 30 borrowers, measured by peak balances, were European firms. They included Edinburgh-based Royal Bank of Scotland Plc, which took $84.5 billion, the most of any non-U.S. lender, and Zurich-based UBS AG, which got $77.2 billion. Germany’s Hypo Real Estate AG borrowed $28.7 billion, an average of $21 million for each of its 1,366, employees.

* The U.S. Federal Reserve mounted an unprecedented campaign to head off a depression by providing as much as $1.2 trillion in public money to banks and other companies from August 2007 through April 2010. The emergency loans were intended to help recipients cope with cash shortfalls and keep credit markets from grinding to a halt. Bloomberg News combined the Fed databases made available in December with the discount-window records to produce daily totals for banks across all the programs, including the discount window, TAF, PDCF, Term Securities Lending Facility, Commercial Paper Funding Facility, single-tranche open market operations and the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Lending Facility.