The Federal Reserve pumped $1.2 trillion in emergency loans to financial service institutions during the peak of the financial crisis – with half of the funds going to banks headquartered outside of the U.S.
According to a Bloomberg report, nearly half of the top 30 borrowers were foreign institutions: Royal Bank of Scotland Plc ($84.5 billion), Switzerland's UBS AG ($77.2 billion), Germany's Hypo Real Estate Holding AG ($28.7 billion) were the top three borrowers. Banks from Canada, Switzerland, France, Portugal, Japan, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Bahrain also received Fed funds.
Among U.S. institutions, Morgan Stanley was the largest recipient of Fed funds, receiving $107.3 billion – nearly three times the company's total profits from the previous decade. Morgan Stanley did not publicly acknowledge the Fed's loans when it issued a press release on Sept. 29, 2008, that stated it possessed ‘strong capital and liquidity positions.’
Other U.S. institutions that sought Fed aid include Citigroup, which received $99.5 billion, and Bank of America, which received $91.4 billion.
Bloomberg filed Freedom of Information Act requests and pursued litigation in order to access the Fed's lending data; the Dodd-Frank Act required the Fed to make the data public. Bloomberg estimated that the $1.2 trillion figure was the combined outstanding balance of seven Fed programs tallied by Bloomberg and was approximately three times the size of the U.S. federal budget deficit for 2008.
Bloomberg's full report of the Fed's lending activities is online.