Bloomberg News recently “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.” In their upward revision of the previous, widely-floated figure, Bloomberg found that the “Wall Street aristocracy” actually received $1.2 trillion in secret loans from the Federal government:
“These are all whopping numbers,” said Robert Litan, a former Justice Department official who in the 1990s served on a commission probing the causes of the savings and loan crisis. “You’re talking about the aristocracy of American finance going down the tubes without the federal money.”
No wonder so many of them appear to have redistributionist hearts of gold:
“New York Times columnists may kvell over Warren Buffett’s eagerness to be taxed at a higher rate, but most people suspect that it isn’t saintliness at work, but personal economic interest. The same interest that led Buffett, Bill Gates and other top billionaires to support Obama. There is nothing strange about the phenomenon of anti-capitalist capitalists. Capitalism is one way to make money. Socialism is another. The modern monopoly is as likely to rest on government regulation as on the naked marketplace. And the modern trust operates out of the White House and Capitol Hill.”
Daniel Greenfield’s “An Earthquake Comes to Washington” — the source of the above quote — here.
