The Federal Reserve’s “Main Street Lending Program”, supposed to lend to municipalities and small businesses in this economic crisis, has become an obvious fake. The current balance sheet of the Federal Reserve shamefully underlines this: 95% of its $7 trillion balance sheet consists in securities bought from big Wall Street and European banks to provide them liquidity, and 2% more is dollar swap lines to enable other central banks to do the same. In remarks to the press Sept. 5, President Donald Trump raised the lid on this fakery.
Trump said: “Now, we have $300 billion in a — an account that we didn’t use — $300 billion. And we are willing to use that. I would be willing to release it, subject to Congress, and use that as stimulus money, and it would go right to the American people.” The President subsequently added, “It’s money that we have — money that we built up and money that we haven’t spent, and I would love to give it to the American people as a very powerful stimulus.”
This $300 billion – actually $307 billion – represents two-thirds, wasted, of the $454 billion authorized by Congress for the Treasury to provide to the Federal Reserve to “back up” the Fed’s injections of money into the financial system. All this was arranged and managed by BlackRock LLP, Wall Street’s largest and most influential fund manager, which set up the “special purpose vehicles” (SPVs) through which the taxpayer’s hundreds of billions was offered, to absorb the “first losses” of the Federal Reserve’s operations bailing out financial markets.
