Last night during the Jill Stein Town Hall on CNN Chris Cuomo made errors in his discussion of QE. He said that the Wall Street banks had gotten their QE money as low-interest loans from the Federal Reserve, and that these loans had been paid back in full. He said this several times in his discussion with Jill Stein. (I wish I had the transcript.) I had read that assertion once in the MSM back during the time after Wall Street had used their QE money to pay executives outrageous salaries and bonuses for their performance during the crisis. (Sorry, I don't have that transcript either.) But this assertion is a lie on its face. I'm pretty sure that neither Jill Stein nor Cuomo knew it was a lie, because both of them behaved as if it was true and was a mitigating factor in the argument that the bonuses and high dollar salaries were inappropriate.
Here's why I know it is a lie. The money was created and granted to the banks to be used in the TARP program. How was that done? The Federal Reserve bought the toxic assets from the creditors at book value--not at the depressed current market value. This money was used to buttress the balance sheets of the creditors to avoid insolvency.
So where did the creditors get the money to pay back the QE "loans" they got from the Federal Reserve? Answer: They didn't have any way to get the money to pay the QE "loans" off; ergo, they DIDN'T pay off these "loans". And they will never be paid off. The Federal Reserve now owns a lot of empty houses that can't be sold because there is no market (or they have been sold to the US Treasury and paid for in full with bonds, adding the face value of the bonds to the national debt).
This lie was invented to obfuscate the wheeling and dealing that Obama allowed when Geithner and Bernanke met with him the day after the crash. Bernanke had told Obama in the meeting that if he refused to sign the bill there would likely be no economy on the day after. And Obama bought that argument.
It was interesting to hear Cuomo bring it up in the discussion with Jill Stein. She did not correct him either, so obviously the obfuscation has worked.
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