Good grief. Bernie Sanders is spot on with his criticism of Fed policy. How is it that small, credit-worthy businesses in the US were left out in the cold but the Fed could lend billions to the likes of Bank Gaddafi? It's no wonder the Fed wanted to hide details of their lending. If the US is going to save ultra-rich bankers and dictators, why not the American middle class?
Arab Banking Corp., the lender part- owned by the Central Bank of Libya, used a New York branch to get 73 loans from the U.S. Federal Reserve in the 18 months after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. collapsed.
The bank, then 29 percent-owned by the Libyan state, had aggregate borrowings in that period of $35 billion -- while the largest single loan amount outstanding was $1.2 billion in July 2009, according to Fed data released yesterday. In October 2008, when lending to financial institutions by the central bank’s so- called discount window peaked at $111 billion, Arab Banking took repeated loans totaling more than $2 billion.
