None of us had any real doubt that the Fed had been funneling money to Banksters even before TARP in the closing days of the Bush regime, during which he and his Republican cronies trashed the economy. How much it actually was and where it actually went is obscene. Had that money gone to main street, it could have been used to pay off every loan Banksters foreclosed after they killed the housing market. I’m not suggesting that, but just want to give you an idea of the scale involved here.

Citigroup Inc. (C) and Bank of America Corp. (BAC) were the reigning champions of finance in 2006 as home prices peaked, leading the 10 biggest U.S. banks and brokerage firms to their best year ever with $104 billion of profits. By 2008, the housing market’s collapse forced those companies to take more than six times as much, $669 billion, in emergency loans from the U.S. Federal Reserve. The loans dwarfed the $160 billion in public bailouts the top 10 got from the U.S. Treasury, yet until now the full amounts have remained secret. Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s unprecedented effort to keep the economy from plunging into depression included lending banks and other companies as much as $1.2 trillion of public money, about the same amount U.S. homeowners currently owe on 6.5 million delinquent and foreclosed mortgages. The largest borrower, Morgan Stanley (MS), got as much as $107.3 billion, while Citigroup took $99.5 billion and Bank of America $91.4 billion, according to a Bloomberg News compilation of data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, months of litigation and an act of Congress. “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.” (View the Bloomberg interactive graphic to chart the Fed’s financial bailout.) Foreign Borrowers It wasn’t just American finance. Almost half of the Fed’s top 30 borrowers, measured by peak balances, were European firms. They included Edinburgh-based Royal Bank of Scotland Plc, which took $84.5 billion, the most of any non-U.S. lender, and Zurich-based UBS AG (UBSN), which got $77.2 billion. Germany’s Hypo Real Estate Holding AG borrowed $28.7 billion, an average of $21 million for each of its 1,366 employees… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Bloomberg>

I strongly urge you to read the rest of this article. I gave you only a small part of it. Also, try playing with the interactive graphic noted above.

What is critical to understand here is that, by the time Obama took office in 2009, the Bush regime had already funneled so much into the TBTF banks that Obama had no choice except to complete the process, lest Bankster default collapsed the Fed as well. Therefore, Republican attempts to blame Obama for their own crisis are pure bull.

Under water homeowners, should have an opportunity to refinance, devaluing the loans to market levels, but Republicans refuse to allow help for Main Street.