by Pam Martens and Russ Martens at Wall Street on Parade
It is now one of the unspoken but immutable dictates on Wall Street: with each new banking crisis, the Federal Reserve will quickly create an emergency bailout program and give it a three to four letter abbreviation so that it vanishes into an alphabet soup blur of Fed bailout programs that preceded it.
The latest iteration came in the spring of 2023 in response to a run on federally-insured banks that federal regulators had allowed to get in bed with crypto and/or had allowed to binge on uninsured deposits. The Fed quickly launched the Bank Term Funding Program (BTFP) on March 12, 2023.
BTFP joined the copious iterations from the Fed’s COVID-19 related bailouts and the Fed’s 2007-2010 bailouts with names like the Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF), Commercial Paper Funding Facility (CPFF), Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (MMLF), Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF) and so on.
The one giant Fed bailout program that didn’t get an alphabet soup nickname was the Fed’s repo loan bailouts that occurred in the last quarter of 2019. By not naming the emergency lending program, perhaps the Fed was hoping its unsavory details would be forgotten. That program provided $19.87 trillion in term-adjusted revolving loans to the same Wall Street megabanks that the Fed had bailed out in the 2007-2010 crisis. (See Internal Charts Show Treasury Agency Assigned to Measure Risk in U.S. Markets Slept through the Repo Crisis of 2019 and the Fed’s $19.87 Trillion Bailout.)
Under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010,…
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