Goldman Actually Borrowed From Fed Discount Window 5 Times, Contradicting Bank Claims

Looks like Goldman has been a more frequent visitor to the Federal trough than they’ve been letting on. Despite testifying before Congress that they had only accessed the Federal Reserve’s discount window, which lets banks borrow cash from the government quickly and on favorable terms, just once, Bloomberg reports that recently released data shows they actually took at least five overnight loans from the Fed between September 2008 and 2010.

From Bloomberg:

Goldman Sachs President and Chief Operating Officer Gary D. Cohn told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission June 30 that “we used it one night at the request of the Fed to make sure our systems were linked with their systems, and it was for a de minimis amount of money.” Peter J. Wallison, a member of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, then asked, “you never had to use it after that?”

“No, and as I said, we used it on the Fed’s request,” Cohn replied.

The biggest of the loans was $50 million, taken out on September 23, 2008. Other loans were taken out on October 1 and October 23 of that year, a loan on September 9, 2009 and one on January 11, 2010. The most recent loans were the smallest, for $1 million.

Considering that you can find a million dollars in the snot of a used tissue tossed by Lloyd Blankfein, what matters more isn’t the size of the loans, but the discrepancy between how many were taken out and how many Cohn told Congress that Goldman took.

Goldman Borrowed From Fed Discount Window at Least Five Times, Data Show [Bloomberg]

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