Federally Frightened Friday

The Fed raised the discount rate - Big Deal!   As I said in my Weekly Wrap-Up , recessions are for wimps and kudos to the Fed for finally pulling out the stick after all the soft talking they’ve been doing.  Meanwhile, I do not see what all the fuss is about - I did the math for Members last night and banks borrow about $89Bn at the discount window on a good day and 0.25% of $87Bn is a grand total of $22M - this is NOT going cause the fall of Western Civilization people!  What it does do is stop making the Fed the lender of first resort, which was never supposed to be their function in the first place .  The MSM should be more concerned with the end of the TALF, which is where the Fed buys up toxic assets from the banks at face value (we’ll all be paying for that later) and they just announced that the Fed’s holding of Mortgage-Backed Securities went over the $1Tn mark yesterday , bringing the Fed’s Balance Sheet to $2.25Tn of very questionable assets that they’ve bought for us from the banksters.  Speaking of banksters - Kudos to Matt Taibbi for his excellent Wall Street’s Bailout Hustle .  As I said to Members, if it wasn’t for Matt and Dylan Ratigan, I would have to be writing about this stuff instead of following the markets.  Thank goodness there are a few top-notch people investigating this nonsense with the ability to communicate their findings in a way that makes it interesting : The nation’s six largest banks — all committed to this balls-out, I drink your milkshake! strategy of flagrantly gorging themselves as America goes hungry — set aside a whopping $140 billion for executive compensation last year, a sum only slightly less than the $164 billion they paid themselves in the pre-crash year of 2007. The question everyone should be asking, as one bailout recipient after another posts massive profits — Goldman reported $13.4 billion in profits last year, after paying out that $16.2 billion in bonuses and compensation — is this: In an economy as horrible as ours, with every factory town between New York and Los Angeles looking like those hollowed-out ghost ships we see on History Channel documentaries like Shipwrecks of the Great Lakes, where in the hell did Wall Street’s eye-popping profits come from, exactly? Did Goldman go from bailout city to $13.4 billion in the black because, as Blankfein suggests,…