Did the Fed’s Emergency Lending Prop Up “Too Big to Fail”?

“Wall Street was in much deeper trouble than we ever imagined.” — Bob Ivry, Bloomberg News

Late last year, Bloomberg News broke the story of the Fed’s unprecedented intervention in the financial markets — under which it made trillions of dollars in loans, commitments and guarantees to financial institutions around the world. After two years of legal wrangling, the news organization obtained thousands of pages of documents, which revealed critical details about the emergency lending, including how much money went to which banks, when and at what interest rates.

“What we found out, really, was that Wall Street was in much deeper trouble than we ever imagined,” Bob Ivry, one of the Bloomberg reporters investigating the loans, told FRONTLINE. In a series of reports, Bloomberg laid out three main calculations: