Bloomberg news has served up another bombshell story on the Federal Reserve loans during the 2008-2010 bail outs. Banks made $13 billion off of secret and ultra-cheap loans from the Federal Reserve. Banks lost $21.6 billion during the same time. That's $13 billion of free money in essence.

Literally the Fed committed $$7.77 Trillion to bailing out these banks. This dwarfs the $700 billion TARP bail out. Bloomberg:

Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.

A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.