Sunday, November 29, 2020

Where's the $340 billion?

In March Congress passed the CARES Act, which provided $454 billion to be distributed by the Treasury to the Federal Reserve to be used for emergency lending programs to save businesses and jobs during the pandemic and keep credit flowing to the economy.
 
But for months now, the Federal Reserve’s weekly financial statements have indicated that all the Fed has received from Treasury for its emergency lending facilities was $114 billion, leaving $340 billion unaccounted for. Yet, since March 98,000 businesses have permanently closed while this money, intended for economic relief, went missing. 

Now, Mnuchin has told the Fed that he wants all the remaining money back so that he can put it to better use. He had taken some money back earlier this year. He bought $11 billion of US securities and deposited another $20+ billion with foreign governments. 

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Included in the $1.4 trillion CARES act is a $600B Main Street Lending Program for small and medium sized businesses being administered by the Boston branch of the FED. A piece in the Washington Post claims that MSLP has made just 420 loans worth only $4.1B. $25M went to a big time Trump supporter to fund high interest, short term consumer loans through his string of car loan branches. What's happened to the rest of the allotted money is anyone's guise.