(Community Matters) An extraordinary transfer of wealth to the Wall Street class. Not a surprise the FED and six biggest US banks fought disclosure for over 2 years – it isn’t obvious that the $7 trillion was critical to market stability – though, perhaps was; that’s not the point. It is obvious that bankers were talking out of their asses about their free market competitiveness & soundness, while they were being further bailed out.
Mind boggling that Congress knew nothing about this. Arbitraging the money may have earned financial institutions up to $13 billion.
And, during this time banks & the rest of the financial services industry were literally spending some of these billions greasing the hands of members of Congress and deploying million dollar lobbyists to defeat regulation intended to protect consumers and prevent another 2008 global financial meltdown – and yes of course, paying out multi-million dollar bonuses. Stockholders, bondholders and executives of these financial institutions received a disproportionate bailout by taxpayers, while the latter have mostly gotten the shaft. That’s what Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Austin, Occupy Anytown USA is all about.
Bloomberg: Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion Undisclosed to Congress.
Community Matters 
I don’t fully understand what the Fed does and neither do, I suspect, 99+% of the public, but when an organization is that powerful and influential, they need to be reasonably transparent and accountable to society. I understand the benefits of removing day-to-day interventions in the money system from elected politicians, but ultimately there must be some accountability. As much as I hate to agree with Ron Paul, his idea of auditing the Fed is sounding good.
BTW, I don’t think it’s productive to focus on compensation of people on Wall St and I don’t think the better criticisms of the financial industry do so. It doesn’t matter what those companies pay their employees; the scandal is how much they make in operating profits in the first place through anti-competitive practices, insider knowledge, and government bailouts and subsidies. The problem with criticizing pay is that there are high paid people in other industries and opponents of reform counter with “the janitors and secretaries on Wall St. don’t make big salaries”. Which is true, but also completely irrelevant.