Congressman Grayson: Fed Secretly “Stuffed” $500 Billion into “Foreign Private Pockets” and Gave $230 Billion to Citi “As a Secret Bailout”

Washington’s Blog
Thursday, Sept 17th, 2009

Congressman Alan Grayson gave an interview to Wall Street Cheat Sheet’s Damien Hoffman, which includes the following bombshells:

H.R. 1207 is one of the simplest bills imaginable. Unlike the healthcare bill which is over 1000 pages, H.R. 1207 is a page and a half. The bill lists the existing exclusion of the Federal Reserve from oversight by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and allows the GAO — an independent body — to audit the Federal Reserve Bank.

The Federal Reserve Bank has not had an independent audit since it was created almost 100 years ago, and it needs an audit. Many times we have exposed gross acts of irresponsibility on the part of the Federal Reserve. So, we need to dig in and get details.

Just a few weeks ago, while Chairman Bernanke was testifying to Congress, we examined the Fed balance sheet and P&L statement only to find what looked like the Fed handing over half a trillion dollars to foreigners. This was very surprising! When I asked Chairman Bernanke if this was true, he said, “Yes.” When I asked him who got the money, he said, “Fourteen foreign Central Banks.” And when I asked to who did they give the money, he said, “I don’t know.” “I don’t know” is not good enough when you’re talking about $500 billion. That’s $1700 for every man, woman, and child in this country…

They are performing a truly remarkable, surreptitious transfer of wealth from public to private hands. They are taking their ability to print money and shore up failed banks. They are simply stuffing money into the pockets of private interests.

In the case of the half a trillion dollars, they stuffed the money into foreign private pockets. In the case of another $230 billion, it has been tracked as a secret bailout to Citicorp in the US. The fact is the Federal Reserve continuously puts all of us on the hook for decisions they make to play favorites with private interests to the tune of trillions of dollars…

The Federal Reserve’s own website has some incredibly interesting information about the general state of the US economy and the distribution of wealth in our country. I was recently reading our national wealth capped out at $62 trillion two-years ago has crashed to $50 trillion since. Those are Federal Reserve statistics on their website.