Federal Financing Bank?
Bruce Krasting at Zero Hedge has been on the case of the Federal Financing Bank. I am still unclear if the agency is actually providing the cash or just the guarantee, but it was the one rolling out the Solyndra loan (under DOE auspices, I suppose).
In July, it was still sending cash of some sort to Solyndra - it may be that this was just a drawdown of money under its original loan commitment, or it may be new money. A couple of things you can see are:
- A heck of a lot of money was still going out the door to solar programs, likely with no oversight
- Ford, the supposedly bailout-free company, sure seems to be gobbling up a lot of government guaranteed loans for something.
- We were lending to Solyndra at 0.89% interest.
All told, a whopping 3/4 of a billion dollars of government guaranteed loans to private companies went out the door in July alone.
Other observations from the report: The report is hard to read, as it is hard to correlate the new financing activity to changes in the balance sheet. But there is just a ton of loan activity to rural electric companies. Wasn't rural electrification an issue in the 1930's? Isn't it time to let rural electric companies stand on their own two feet and get their own money from the capital markets?
There is also a lot of activity issuing HOPE for Homeowners money - it looks like the government is lending (to banks?) at 0.01% interest. What is the difference between a 0.01% thirty year loan and a gift?
