Courtesy of Pam Martens
The CARES Act was signed into law on March 27. Congress earmarked $454 billion of that stimulus money 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 U.S. economy. The catch was that the Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin, would have to give his approval for each of the programs.
Since June, Wall Street On Parade has been reporting that $340 billion of the $454 billion that Mnuchin was instructed to turn over to the Fed was unaccounted for. We noted that 98,000 businesses had permanently closed in the U.S. while this money, intended for economic relief, went missing.
On November 19, Mnuchin publicly issued a letter to Fed Chair Jerome Powell, making it sound like most of the CARES Act money has been sitting idle at the Fed and Mnuchin was demanding it back to put to better use.
Adding to our conviction that Mnuchin was intentionally misleading the public, Bloomberg News published an article on Tuesday about the funds that Mnuchin planned to claw back from the Fed. The Bloomberg article carried this sentence: “The money in question includes $429 billion that Mnuchin is clawing back from the Fed — which backed some of the central bank’s emergency lending facilities…”
But for months now, the Federal Reserve’s weekly financial statements known as the H.4.1 have indicated that all the Fed received from Treasury for its emergency lending facilities was $114 billion, leaving $340 billion unaccounted for.
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