IRS Admits Refunding Billions On Fake Tax Returns | Zero …

The report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration shows the Internal Revenue Service continued to pay refunds on hundreds of thousands of fraudulent tax returns in recent years, and sent dozens of checks to the same addresses, including in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. As The Wall Street Journal reports,

The new IG report says the IRS took steps for the 2013 filing season that resulted in “increased detection and prevention of identity theft tax returns.” But it said the agency continued to be hampered by several factors, including its inability to look at employer income data during the early weeks of the annual filing season.

The IG found that the IRS missed almost 800,000 potentially fraudulent tax returns.

In response, the IRS said it disputed some of the IG’s methodology. It thinks more than half of the nearly 800,000 returns identified by the IG should not be considered potentially fraudulent.

“Much more work remains, but it’s important to note that our actions have led to an increasing number of fraudulent returns being detected and stopped — despite challenging budgets in recent years,” the IRS said in a statement.

Where are the fraudulent returns going?

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The U.S. government has been paying out billions of dollars in false tax returns.

Billions of dollars have also been sent over to bail out Greece, to help them pay off some of their massive debt obligations to major banks and hedge funds.

The U.S. government also paid out billions to bailout Ukraine.

And the government back-stopped Wall Street’s financial services industry with trillions of dollars in emergency lending, credit guarantees, and toxic asset purchases when their subprime gambling binge hit the mountain.

It is now time to give direct access to liquidity to the people who deserve it the most –  U.S. citizens.

The Leviticus 25 Plan 2015 –  $70,000 per U.S. citizen                                                  The Leviticus 25 Plan 2015 (958)

Thank you Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner, and Ben Bernanke – from the bottom of Warren Buffett’s heart…

The U.S. government, responding to a critical need to rescue the Wall Street financial sector and resuscitate the economy during the 2008-09 financial crisis, funneled trillions of dollars in direct cash transfers, emergency loans, credit guarantees, and balance-sheet-clearing toxic mortgage debt purchases – to many of America’s premier financial corporations.

Billionaire Warren Buffett lobbied hard for the massive bailouts, and with good reason. At least eight of these companies receiving billions of dollars of taxpayer bailouts were owned by Mr. Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.

Buffett’s Betrayal: Rolfe Winkler | Reuters  / Aug 4, 2009

Excerpts:                                                                                                                                 A good chunk of his [Warren Buffett’s] fortune is dependent on taxpayer largess. Were it not for government bailouts, for which Buffett lobbied hard, many of his company’s stock holdings would have been wiped out.

Berkshire Hathaway, in which Buffett owns 27 percent, according to a recent proxy filing, has more than $26 billion invested in eight financial companies that have received bailout money. The TARP at one point had nearly $100 billion invested in these companies and, according to new data released by Thomson Reuters, FDIC backs more than $130 billion of their debt.

To put that in perspective, 75 percent of the debt these companies have issued since late November has come with a federal guarantee.

Without FDIC’s debt guarantee program, even impregnable Goldman would have collapsed.

And this excludes the emergency, opaque lending facilities from the Federal Reserve that also helped rescue the big banks. Without all these bailouts, the financial system would have been forced to recapitalize itself.

Banks that couldn’t finance their balance sheets would have sold toxic assets at market prices, and the losses would have wiped out their shareholder’s equity. With $7 billion at stake, Buffett is one of the biggest of these shareholders.

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Meanwhile, back at the ranch in 2015… the country’s second richest man is back, ‘sticking it to’ the very people whose billions of dollars bailed him out seven short years ago – U.S. taxpayers.

Warren Buffett, Slumlord – Predatory Loans, Kickbacks & Preying On The Poor   ZeroHedge /  04/06/2015                                                                                           Excerpts:

Buffett’s mobile-home empire promises low-income Americans the dream of homeownership. But Clayton [controlled by America’s second richest man – billionaire Warren Buffet] relies on predatory sales practices, exorbitant fees, and interest rates that can exceed 15 percent, trapping many buyers in loans they can’t afford and in homes that are almost impossible to sell or refinance, an investigation by The Seattle Times and Center for Public Integrity has found.

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U.S. citizens deserve nothing less than the same access to liquidity that was granted to wealthy elites during the Wall Street bailout.

The Leviticus 25 Plan 2015 –  $70,000 per U.S. citizen                                                    The Leviticus 25 Plan 2015 (864)

Bloomberg’s Bob Ivry discovered, through an FOIA request, that the Federal Reserve had been running a “secretive bailout operation between March and December 2008, under which banks borrowed as much as $855 billion over the time frame for a rate as low as 0.01%.”

The Fed subsequently disclosed: “The Federal Reserve System conducted a series of single-tranche term repurchase agreements from March 2008 to December 2008 with the intention of mitigating heightened stress in funding markets.

These operations were conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York with primary dealers as counterparties…this program helped to address liquidity pressures evident across a number of financing markets and supported the flow of credit to U.S. households and business.”   (Source: ZeroHedge 07/06/2011  – Fed Releases Details On Secret $855 Billion Single-Tra… )

The 5 heaviest borrowers were foreign banks – raking in a cool $593 billion:                Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, RBS and Barclays.

UBS Securities, LLC ($56.9 billion) was #6 on the list.

#7 Goldman Sachs received $53.4 billion – much of it borrowed at a rate of .01% (one basis point).
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The Fed ‘created’ various funding facilities during the financial crisis to bailout Wall Street’s financial market:
Term Auction Facility (TAF)
Commercial Paper Funding Facility (CPFF)
Primary Dealer’s Credit Facility (PDCF)
Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF)
Asset-backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (AMLF)

Wall Street financial institutions also received massive liquidity transfusions at the Fed’s Discount Window (DW).

The one the Fed tried hard to keep out of the spotlight involved the “secret” single-tranche  OMO’s – through which they ‘ladled out’ a whopping $855 billion.

Again, the Fed deemed this necessary to mitigate the “heightened stress in funding markets” (translation: Wall Street’s leveraged speculation strategies got broad-sided by the great mortgage market default wave, and funding markets ‘seized up’).

In the Fed’s own words, the secret ST OMO program “helped to address liquidity pressures evident across a number of financing markets and supported the flow of credit to U.S. households and business” (translation: the biggest and mightiest financial institutions on Wall Street had suddenly developed gaping capital holes… many were on the verge of ‘going under’… and they needed a liquidity lifeline to survive).
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It is now time to “mitigate heightened stress” and to “address liquidity pressures” being experienced by American families.

The Leviticus 25 Plan is a dynamic economic initiative providing direct liquidity benefits for American families, while at the same time scaling back the role of government in managing and controlling the affairs of citizens.  It is a comprehensive plan with long-term economic and social benefits for citizens and government.

The inspiration for this plan is based upon Biblical principles set forth in the Book of Leviticus, principles tendering direct economic liberties to the people.

The Leviticus 25 Plan 2015 –  $70,000 per U.S. citizen                                                    The Leviticus 25 Plan 2015 (833)

HSBC Holdings Plc, a British bank and financial services company, is reputed to be the world’s largest bank, operating in 80 countries around the globe. It was founded in 1991 as the Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC).

HSBC came under investigation in 2012 for allegedly laundering billions of dollars for drug lords and terrorists. A Senate subcommittee indicated that much of the $7 billion transferred by HSBC from Mexico to its U.S. subsidiary had been related to “drug dealing.”

HSBC was accused of “actively circumventing U.S. safeguards to block transactions involving terrorists, drug lords and rogue regimes, including hiding $19.4 billion in transactions with Iran.”

HSBC admitted wrongdoing and paid a record $1.92 billion in fines to resolve the charges of laundering billions of dollars for Latin American drug cartels (Bloomberg, Jul 3, 2013).

“HSBC was accused of failing to monitor more than $670 billion in wire transfers and more than $9.4 billion in purchases of U.S. currency from HSBC Mexico, allowing for money laundering, prosecutors said. The bank also violated U.S. economic sanctions against Iran, Libya, Sudan, Burma and Cuba, according to a criminal information filed in the case.
…. Lack of proper controls allowed the Sinaloa drug cartel in Mexico and the Norte del Valle cartel in Colombia to move more than $881 million through HSBC’s U.S. unit from 2006 to 2010, the government alleged in the case.”
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During this same “2006 to 2010” period that HSBC was laundering money for drug cartels and violating sanctions on behalf of various state terror sponsors, HSBC was also caught up in the subprime debt crisis – and began receiving emergency funding from the U.S. Federal Reserve (and ultimately, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers).

According to Bloomberg (Nov 22, 2011), HSBC accessed several billions of dollars from Fed emergency funding facilities throughout the fall of 2008 and into the summer of 2009. These included the Term Auction Facility (TAF), Commercial Paper Funding Facility (CPFF), Temporary Security Lending Facility, Single-Tranche Open Market Operations (STOMO) and the Fed’s Discount Window (DW).

Peak Amount of Debt on 3/12/2009: $3.7B
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And here is the latest, hot off the presses – HSBC is at it again:                                             (Bloomberg (Feb 9, 2015) – The private-banking unit of HSBC Holdings Plc made significant profits for years handling secret accounts whose holders included drug cartels, arms dealers, tax evaders and fugitive diamond merchants, according to a report released Sunday by an international news organization. 

These latest charges include laundering money for Russian billion oligarchs with close ties to Putin.

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And now for our question of the month:
If large multi-national banks, including foreign banks like HSBC, can conspire against the security interests of the United States and at the same time be granted direct access to billions of dollars through Fed liquidity lines, then what could possibly be the rationale for U.S. citizens NOT being granted equal access…?

Answer:  There isn’t any.

And here we have one of the biggest U.S. taxpayer ‘screw-overs’ of the past 20 years.  And U.S. citizens cannot get the same direct liquidity access that our government provided for HSBC.

It is a travesty of the highest order.

The answer: The Leviticus 25 Plan 2015 – $70,000 per U.S. citizen                             :                     The Leviticus 25 Plan 2015 (773)

Six major banks were recently fined $4.3 billion by regulatory agencies for rigging foreign exchange (FOREX) benchmarks at “crucial moments” on given trading days during 2008 though 2013.

The investigation by four regulatory agencies determined that traders from the big banks manipulated “two key exchange rates, or ‘fixes,’ set each day. One of them, the WM/Reuters fix, is based on trading in a one-minute window around 4pm every day in London. The other, the ECB fix, is a snapshot of the market at 2:15pm in Frankfurt.” (Source: Bloomberg, Nov 12, 2014)

According to the Wall Street Journal (Nov 12, 2014), “Improprieties in the $5.3-trillion-a-day foreign-exchange market have the potential to touch broad swaths of the public. Every time companies or individuals do business in a foreign currency, they are subject to the whims of a market that regulators said has been rife with misconduct by a group of bank traders.”

Here are the banks and the fines levied against each by the four regulating agencies:

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During the very time that these six banks had been rigging FOREX benchmarks (2008-2013), they had also been receiving essentially free liquidity via the Fed Discount Window, as well as billions of dollars in bailouts and emergency loans through the various credit facilities created by Federal Reserve.

Ultimately, these free-money rescue operations are extracted from the hides of U.S. taxpayers, and foreign countries whose currencies are pegged to the Dollar, through an insidious Dollar debasement effect.

The six major banks received billions through the various lending facilities created by the Federal Reserve (dollar figures identify Peak Amount of Debt extended by the Fed for a given date):
Citigroup    $99.5B on 1/20/2009
JP Morgan $68.6B on 10/1/2008
UBS            $77.2B on 11/28/2008
RBS            $84.5B on 10/10/2008
HSBC             $3.7B on 3/12/2009
Bank of America $91.4B on 2/26/2009

Six major banks that rigged FOREX ‘fixes,’  received billions of dollars in Fed (read: U.S. taxpayer) bailouts – to help them regain solvency and financial “health.”.

U.S. citizens deserve nothing less than the same access to their own money – in the form of Fed-based liquidity extensions – to help American families regain their own financial “health.”.

The conduit: a Citizens Credit Facility.

The Leviticus 25 Plan 2015 – $70,000 per U.S. Citizen                                                  The Leviticus 25 Plan 2015 (688)

Foreign banks are profiting from no risk ‘spread-pocketing’ via Fed interest rate policies… and U.S. taxpayers are ‘footing the bill.’

ZeroHedge 9-30-14 excerpts:

“Foreign Banks ‘pocket a spread’ by borrowing cheaply and parking funds at the Federal Reserve…. according to the Wall Street Journal:  “Fed Rate Policies Aid Foreign Banks: Lenders Pocket a Spread by Borrowing Cheaply, Parking Funds at Central Bank”

Though small in relation to their overall revenues, interest payments from the Fed have been a source of virtually risk-free returns for foreign banks. Large holders of Fed reserves include Deutsche Bank, UBS AG, Bank of China and Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, according to bank regulatory filings. U.S. banks including J.P. Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Bank of America Corp. are also big recipients of Fed interest payments, according to the filings.

“It is a small transfer from U.S. taxpayers to foreign taxpayers,” said Joseph Gagnon, a former Fed economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The transfer, he added, was a side effect of Fed policy, not a goal.

Behind the payments is a complex interplay between new government regulatory policies and new methods the Fed has developed to control short-term interest rates.
The Fed has pumped nearly $3 trillion into the banking system since the 2008 financial crisis, increasing banks’ reserves, in efforts to stabilize markets and boost economic growth.

Since 2008, it has paid banks interest of 0.25% on those reserves. The Fed affirmed this month that the rate it pays on reserves will be the primary tool it uses to raise short-term borrowing costs from near zero when the time comes, likely next year.
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“The fact is that the Fed is going to be paying very large amounts of interest to banks,” said William Poole, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. “It’s highly likely that some politicians will notice that and given the proclivity of some politicians anyway to demagogue issues, the Fed is going to have some political explaining to do.”

Since 2009, foreign banks have earned roughly $5 billion by borrowing dollars cheaply, often at less than 0.10%, in short-term funding markets and depositing those funds at the Fed for 0.25%, according to the Journal analysis. That estimate doesn’t take into account the costs of raising money through other means, overhead and taxes, which affect net income.

But don’t blame the banks – they are merely doing what the Fed is encouraging them to do. And after all who wouldn’t collect billions in risk free cash?”
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So here we have the U.S. Federal Reserve providing risk free carry trades to foreign banks, along with major U.S. commercial banks – printing up ‘free money’ currency to hand as a free gift to these global commercial banks… and U.S. taxpayers ‘pick up the tab’ in the form of a drain on future purchasing power of the U.S. Dollar.

Again, “since 2009, foreign banks have earned roughly $5 billion by borrowing dollars cheaply, often at less than 0.10%, in short-term funding markets and depositing those funds at the Fed for 0.25%…”

ARE YOU KIDDING ME….?
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It is time for U.S. citizens to get equal treatment from the Federal Reserve – the same access to liquidity that has been given to “Deutsche Bank, UBS AG, Bank of China and Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, according to bank regulatory filings. U.S. banks including J.P. Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Bank of America Corp.”

The Leviticus 25 Plan provides the mechanism for this equal access to liquidity for U.S. citizens.

The Leviticus 25 Plan 2015 – The $70,000 Solution                                                   September 2014 – Updated version:  The Leviticus 25 Plan 2015 (560)

A recent government report verified that for the 35th consecutive month in a row, over 46 million are receiving food stamps.  A recent GAO report also revealed that food stamp fraud is “rampant” (FoxNews.com August 22, 2014):

“Americans receiving food stamps were caught selling and bartering their benefits online for art, housing and cash, according to a new federal report that investigates fraud in the nation’s largest nutrition support program.

Complicating the situation is the fact states around the country are having trouble tracking and prosecuting the crimes because their enforcement budgets have been slashed despite the rapidly-rising number of food stamp recipients, according to the Government Accountability Office report.

Under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, 47 million people have been awarded $76 billion in benefits. State agencies are responsible for addressing SNAP recipient fraud under the guidance and monitoring of the Food and Nutrition Service.

“Such rapid program growth can increase the potential for fraud unless appropriate agency controls are in place to help minimize these risks,” the investigators said in their report.

The GAO report resulted from a review of 11 state and federal efforts to fight food stamp fraud, effectiveness of certain fraud detection tools and how FNS oversees state anti-fraud efforts.

The report found that “most of the selected states reported difficulties in conducting fraud investigations due to either reduced or maintained staff levels while SNAP recipient numbers greatly increased from fiscal year 2009 through 2013.

[snip]

Allegations of fraud and abuse have long-plagued SNAP and have been used by lawmakers in Washington to argue that the program has spiraled out of control.”
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Government-created social welfare programs promote negative incentives for self-reliance, and are next-to-impossible to efficiently monitor.

Congress has no plan for any type of transition to a better outcome for America’s financially distressed citizens.

America needs a better solution – one that helps lift Americans up out of poverty, instead of one that simply keeps them in a state of on-going dependence on government.

The Leviticus 25 Plan offers the fresh start. It is time for change.

The Leviticus 25 Plan 2015 – The $70,000 Solution                                                   September 2014 – Updated version:  The Leviticus 25 Plan 2015 (560)

The Council on Foreigh Relations, founded in 1921, is a non-profit American organization, populated with senior government figures and politicians, bankers, lawyers, intelligence officers, and other from the elite class.  With offices in New York and Washington, D.C., it is viewed as the nation’s “most influential foreign-policy think tank.”

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Seeking Alpha / Sep 2, 2014  5:55 AM ET – Excerpts

When an article appears in Foreign Affairs, the mouthpiece of the policy-setting Council on Foreign Relations, recommending that the Federal Reserve do a money drop directly on the 99%, you know the central bank must be down to its last bullet.

The September/October issue of Foreign Affairs features an article by Mark Blyth and Eric Lonergan titled “Print Less But Transfer More: Why Central Banks Should Give Money Directly To The People.” It’s the sort of thing normally heard only from money reformers and Social Credit enthusiasts far from the mainstream. What’s going on?

The Fed, it seems, has finally run out of other ammo. It has to taper its quantitative easing program, which is eating up the Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities needed as collateral for the repo market that is the engine of the bankers’ shell game. The Fed’s Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) has also done serious collateral damage. The banks that get the money just put it in interest-bearing Federal Reserve accounts or buy foreign debt or speculate with it; and the profits go back to the 1%, who park it offshore to avoid taxes. Worse, any increase in the money supply from increased borrowing increases the overall debt burden and compounding finance costs, which are already a major constraint on economic growth.

Meanwhile, the economy continues to teeter on the edge of deflation….

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The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is marginally on the right track.  But their proposal does nothing to restore economic liberty in America, and it does nothing to free people from the heavy hand of government in controlling and restricting them in managing their daily affairs.

The Leviticus 25 Plan does restore economic liberty in America, and it frees people from oppressive government programs that actually keep them in poverty and servitude.

The Leviticus 25 Plan would effect wide-scale debt elimination at the family level, thereby helping to insulate millions of Americans from potentially devastating effects of another severe economic contraction.

The Plan would eliminate massive government restrictions and control over healthcare, and replace it with individual control  and consumer choice in healthcare access.

The Leviticus 25 Plan would balance the federal budget – immediately in Year One.

With millions of American families financially distressed and living paycheck-to-paycheck, the Federal Reserve is handing out ‘free money’ to foreign banks through an Interest On Excess Reserves (IOER) arbitrage play.

David Stockman explains the process:
In recent years foreign banks have been tapping U.S. money market funds for very cheap short-term loans. Unlike domestic banks, foreign banks don’t have domestic depositors to tap for funds, so they turn elsewhere for dollars. Money market funds make the funds available for a few hundredths of a percentage point. The foreign banks in turn park those loans at the Fed for 0.25% interest. They earn profits on the spread between the cheap cost of funds available from money market funds and the higher rate they get at the Fed.
It’s a trade that domestic U.S. banks have been unwilling to make because they have to pay additional fees to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. on their borrowings, fees the foreign banks don’t have to pay.

Source:  “Why The Fed’s Outrageous Gift To Foreign Banks— Risk Free Aribitrage On IOER–Is Just The Tip Of The Iceberg”  –  by David Stockman

This is a risk-free arbitrage play, with the Fed forking over millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer funds to ……. foreign banks.
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Meanwhile, in America today there are 47 million Americans on food stamps – and on top of that, millions of Americans are lining up at food pantries and ‘soup lines’ each week.

According to RealtyTrac (August 2014), “There are currently 1,089,253 properties in U.S. that are in some stage of foreclosure (default, auction or bank owned)…”

Real Median Household Income has been in a steady downtrend for a decade.

Big government social welfare programs dribble out benefits each week and disincentivize work in a way that perpetuates the underclass.

Central-planning and ‘government allocation of resources” dispense political favors and generate gross price distortions.

And our U.S. Federal Reserve is subsidizing foreign banks…

It is time for American families to be granted the same access to their own money that that foreign banks are have access to through the Fed’s IOER scheme.

It is time to get America moving again with a plan that restores economic freedom, reduces the scope and control of big government over citizens, and restores economic health in America – and pays for itself over a 10-15 year period.

The Leviticus 25 Plan.

LIBOR, the London Interbank Offered Rate, is the average interest rate (estimate) that leading London banks would pay, at a given point in time, if they were to borrow money from other banks.

Some 16 major global banking operations are believed to have been involved in ‘rate-manipulation’ schemes burned U.S. homeowners out of “billions of dollars” by consistently, artificially popping the LIBOR rate up on the first day of the month – the day when interest rates were reset for ARMs (adjustable rate mortgages).

Affected U.S. mortgage-holders were defrauded in the schemes.

LIBOR rate-rigging also cost municipalities across the U.S. billions of dollars in municipal bond costs by artificially ‘tilting’ rates against the interest rate swaps that had been purchased by municipalities, such as Baltimore, to hedge the bonds.
And these schemes affected the value of ‘swap lines’ that were held by several dozen U.S. banks, that were tied to LIBOR rates.

Reuters reported on March 14, 2014 that the FDIC was suing 16 banks that it believed were involved in LIBOR rate-rigging: “The banks named as defendants include Bank of America Corp, Citigroup Inc, Credit Suisse Group AG, Deutsche Bank AG, HSBC Holdings PLC, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC.”
“Other defendants in the lawsuit are Rabobank, Lloyds Banking Group plc, Societe Generale, Norinchukin Bank, Royal Bank of Canada, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ and WestLB AG.”  Barclays and UBS had already settled.
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Note: all of the named banks had received billions of dollars, during the height of the financial crisis, from the Fed’s “secret liquidity lifelines.”
Citigroup, peak amount received from Fed: $99.5B
Bank of America: $91.4B
RBS:   $84.5B
Barclays  $64.9B

The most recent bank to be implicated, and fined: Lloyd’s Banking Group, Plc, peak amount received from Fed during the financial crisis: $505M
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The very banks that received billions of dollars in bailout funds from the U.S. Federal Reserve were defrauding American families, state municipalities, and other U.S. financial institutions.

American families deserve nothing less than the same access to liquidity that these banks received, from U.S. taxpayers, during the financial crisis.

The Leviticus 25 Plan