The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap Highlight

But all of it—TARP, the more obscure bailout facilities like TAF, even the fact that the Federal Reserve and the SEC allow banks like Chase to overestimate the value of their portfolios systematically in their annual accounting statements—it all pales in importance to the fact that, as a commercial bank holding company, Chase gets to borrow virtually unlimited sums of money from the Fed for free. In 2010 we found out through an audit of the Federal Reserve that America’s biggest banks had borrowed $16 trillion from the Fed at far below market interest rates,…