The Federal Reserve

Credit is a system whereby a person who cannot pay

gets another person who cannot pay to guarantee that he can pay.

Charles Dickens

Did some negatively influence economic performance and consumer behavior
through legislation, budget appropriation, regulation and taxation
to benefit a few at the expense of many?

Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial

is not freedom.

Friedrich August von Hayek

Are some who reaped exorbitant Wall Street bonuses
when mark to market accounting created gains
among those who lobbied for the accounting method to be suspended
as valuations retarded compensation?

If eighty-three of the nation's 100 largest corporations
had subsidiaries in offshore tax havens in 2007
and some of the companies received federal bailout funding…?

The proposal of any new law or regulation which comes from [businessmen]

ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted,

till after having been long and carefully examined

not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention.

It comes from an order of men

whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public,

who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public,

and who accordingly have, upon many occasions both deceived and oppressed it.

Adam Smith

Moral philosopher and Father of Modern Economics

Should shareholder and debt investors reap profits
from money borrowed from a nation’s children,
to save companies responsible for creating the need to be bailed out?

Did some stabilize financial markets in the short term
to defend legacies and financial interests, regardless of long term consequences?

If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable

...Our government teaches the whole people by its example.

If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law;

it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.

Louis Brandeis

Why would the Federal Reserve decline to disclose the values of collateral
for money lent to financial institutions during 2008’s financial crisis?

Can greed and/or fear lead some to believe some things
are less or more risky than they actually are?

U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s two-year fight

to shield crisis-squeezed banks from the stigma of revealing their public loans

protected a lender to local governments in Belgium,

a Japanese fishing-cooperative financier

and a company part-owned by the Central Bank of Libya.

The biggest borrowers from the 97-year-old discount window

as the program reached its crisis-era peak were foreign banks,

accounting for at least 70 percent of the $110.7 billion borrowed

during the week in October 2008 when use of the program surged to a record.

Six European banks were among the top 11 companies that sold the most debt overall

-- a combined $274.1 billion…

Bloomberg

The Fed says $1.25 trillion in agency MBS were purchased
between January 2009 and March 2010.

The Fed purchased $293 billion in MBS from Deutsche Bank,
and $287 billion from Credit Suisse.

Rounding out the list's top six, and with significantly less MBS bought by the Fed,
was Morgan Stanley, then Citi, then Merrill Lynch, then Goldman Sachs.

Business Insider