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News Center – Springhill Group Home Loans : Fed Seen Buying $545B of Home-Loan Debt : Report

News Center – Springhill Group Home Loans

By Joseph Woelfel

NEW YORK (TheStreet) — The Federal Reserve is poised to start a new round of stimulus, Bloomberg reported, citing the biggest bond dealers in the U.S.

The Fed will inject more money into the economy next quarter by purchasing mortgage securities instead of Treasuries, the bond dealers said. The Fed may buy about $545 billion in home-loan debt, Bloomberg said.

The Fed bought $2.3 trillion of Treasury and mortgage-related bonds between 2008 and June.

Separately, Bloomberg reported the Fed and big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing, Bloomberg said, based on 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions.

According to Bloomberg Markets magazine’s January issue, the Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day; bankers didn’t mention 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 got an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates.

Fed officials say almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, but details suggest the secret funding enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger, according to Bloomberg.

The six biggest U.S. banks — JPMorgan Chase(JPM_), Bank of America(BAC_), Citigroup(C_), Wells Fargo(WFC_), Goldman Sachs(GS_) and Morgan Stanley (MS_)which received $160 billion from the Troubled Assets Relief Program, borrowed as much as $460 billion from the Fed, Bloomberg calculated, citing data obtained from the Fed.

– Written by Joseph Woelfel


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