In a stunning revelation, Bloomberg has obtained 29,000 pages of Federal Reserve documents detailing the largest bailout in American history.  According to an article that will appear in the January issue of Bloomberg Markets magazine, the “Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on December 5, 2008, their single neediest day.  Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy.  And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates.”

The $7.77 trillion that the central bank made available stunned even Gary H. Stern, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 1985 to 2009.  According to Stern, he “wasn’t aware of the magnitude.”  It overshadows the Treasury Department’s better-known $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) program.  When you add up guarantees and lending limits, it becomes clear that the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March, 2009 to rescuing the financial system. That is more than half the value of the U.S. GDP that year.  “TARP at least had some strings attached,” said Representative Brad Miller (D-NC), a member of the House Financial Services Committee.  “With the Fed programs, there was nothing.”

According to Bloomberg’s editors, “Even as they were tapping the Fed for emergency loans at rates as low as 0.01 percent, the banks that were the biggest beneficiaries of the program were assuring investors that their firms were healthy.  Moreover, these banks used money they had received in the bailout to lobby Congress against reforms aimed at preventing the next collapse.  By keeping the details of its activities under wraps, the Fed deprived lawmakers of the essential information they needed to draft those rules. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, for example, was debated and passed by Congress in 2010 without a full understanding of how deeply the banks had depended on the Fed for survival.  Similarly, lawmakers approved the Treasury Department’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program to rescue the banks without knowing the details of the far larger bailout being run by the Fed.

“The central bank justified its approach by saying that disclosing the information would have signaled to the markets that the financial institutions that received help were in trouble.  That, in turn, would make needy institutions reluctant to use the Fed as a lender of last resort in the next crisis.  Fed officials argue, with some justification, that the program helped avert a much bigger economic cataclysm and that all the loans have now been repaid.”

Derek Thompson, a senior editor at The Atlantic, argues that the Fed’s secret bailout is a sign that it was doing its job.  According to Thompson, “First, you can be furious that the Federal Reserve ‘committed’ $7.7 trillion — a sum of money equal to half of the U.S. economy — to save the financial system.  I understand the shock, but we were at the precipice of catastrophe and that money wasn’t ‘spent’ so much as it was put at risk and subsequently recouped.  The economy has struggled in the three years since, but we avoided meltdown.  The trillions worked.

“Second, you can be furious that the banks made a profit off of their own mistakes — but $13 billion is a small price to pay for staving off Armageddon.  Third, you can be furious that the Federal Reserve went to court to keep this information out of the hands of journalists.  There, I’d agree.  It’s Congress’s job (not the Federal Reserve’s job) to pass laws that govern the banking sector, but Congress needs information to make good decisions about regulating banks and it’s disappointing that the Federal Reserve withheld details about its bailouts while the commission and the Dodd-Frank debate were ongoing.  Fourth, you can be furious that our central bank basically did the right thing when it had to, and its counterpart in Europe won’t — at the risk of a continental meltdown.”

Times’ Massimo Calabresi agrees. According to Calabresi, “But the Fed saved the world economy through all this lending without losing a penny in the process.  And after its initial heavy breathing, the article does give the Fed an opportunity to explain itself.  ‘Supporting financial-market stability in times of extreme stress is a core function of central banks,’ said William B. English, director of the Fed’s Division of Monetary Affairs.  “Our lending programs served to prevent a collapse of the financial system and to keep credit flowing to American families and businesses.’  In other words, lending money to banks in a crisis is the whole point of the Fed:  saving the world economy by flooding the system with money when it is about to freeze up is exactly what the central bank was created to do.”

The Fed has been lending money to banks since just after it was established in 1913. By the end of 2008, the Fed had created or expanded 11 lending facilities catering to financial firms that were unable to obtain short-term loans from their usual sources.  “Supporting financial-market stability in times of extreme market stress is a core function of central banks,” said William English, director of the Fed’s Division of Monetary Affairs.  “Our lending programs served to prevent a collapse of the financial system and to keep credit flowing to American families and businesses.”