In shocking new disclosures, the Washington Post has reported in an article, “Fed aid in financial crisis went beyond U.S. banks to industry, foreign firms,” that in 2008 and 2009 the Federal Reserve created trillions of dollars in corporate welfare as secret bailouts “not just to Wall Street but also to motorcycle makers, telecom firms and foreign-owned banks in 2008 and 2009.”

The Fed’s efforts to prop up the financial sector reached across a broad spectrum of the economy, benefiting stalwarts of American industry including General Electric and Caterpillar and household-name companies such as Verizon, Harley-Davidson and Toyota. The central bank’s aid programs also supported U.S. subsidiaries of banks based in East Asia, Europe and Canada while rescuing money-market mutual funds held by millions of Americans.

The biggest users of the Fed lending programs were some of the world’s largest banks, including Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Swiss-based UBS and Britain’s Barclays, according to more than 21,000 loan records released Wednesday under new financial regulatory legislation.

The data reveal banks turning to the Fed for help almost daily in the fall of 2008 as the central bank lowered lending standards and extended relief to all kinds of institutions it had never assisted before.

Fed officials emphasize that their actions were meant to stabilize a financial system that was on the verge of collapse in late 2008. They note that the actions worked to prevent a complete financial meltdown and that none of the special lending programs has lost money. (Some have recorded healthy profits for taxpayers.)

But the extent of the lending to major banks—and the generous terms of some of those deals – heighten the political peril for a central bank that is already under the gun for a wide range of actions, including a recent decision to try to stimulate the economy by buying $600 billion in U.S. bonds.

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