Last week Bloomberg Markets magazine published an article exposing details about the Federal Reserve's secret emergency loans to banks during the financial crisis.

In the report, Bloomberg Markets calculated that after adding up all the guarantees and loans, the Fed committed $7.77 trillion to rescuing the financial system as of March 2009.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has just sent a letter to Senator Tim Johnson, the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs blasting Bloomberg Market's report. [via @BCAppelbaum]

"There have been a series of recent articles--one just last week--concerning the Federal Reserve's emergency lending activities during the financial crisis. These articles have largely repeated the same information in different formats, and have contained a variety of egregious errors and mistakes."

Bernanke, who said the media is wrong by calling the Fed's lending activities "secretive," also corrected Bloomberg Market's math.

"Second, one article asserted that the Federal Reserve lent or guaranteed $7.7 trillion during the financial crisis. Others have estimated the amounts to be $16 trillion or even $24 trillion. All of these numbers are wildly inaccurate..."

The Fed said total credit outstanding from the program was never more than $1.5 trillion, and suggests that inaccuracies in the media report could have come from double-counting.

UPDATE: "We stand by our reporting," a Bloomberg spokesman told Business Insider.