The File
From Jekyll Island to TARP to quantitative easing: a century of private losses converted into public liabilities, documented at each pass by the institutions doing the converting. The Fed tells the Jekyll Island story on its own website.
The Documented Record
The Federal Reserve's own historical materials document the secret November 1910 Jekyll Island meeting at which the framework for the Federal Reserve Act was drafted. [DOCUMENTED]
Congress authorized 700 billion dollars for TARP in October 2008; SIGTARP has documented the program's costs, recoveries, and fraud prosecutions since. [DOCUMENTED]
Federal Reserve H.4.1 data show total assets growing from under 1 trillion dollars before 2008 to a peak near 9 trillion in 2022. [DOCUMENTED]
Higgs documents the ratchet pattern in his book Crisis and Leviathan: crisis interventions that never fully unwind. [HIGH]
Sources
- Jekyll Island Conference, Federal Reserve History
- Troubled Asset Relief Program, U.S. Department of the Treasury
- Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, Oversight.gov
- Total assets of the Federal Reserve, FRED series WALCL
- Past Crises Have Ratcheted Up Leviathan, Robert Higgs, Independent Institute, 2020 (see also Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan)
Connected Files
ECON-003 documents the fraud architecture inside the modern spending machine. ECON-004 documents the acquisition-side version of the same conversion.