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Yes they did, Maiden Lane [1], which was distinct from TARP you are referring to. I had a somewhat upfront seat at that time and the unequivocal success narrative is, in my opinion, extremely dishonest and manipulative.

We haven’t even started to talk about QE which is actually why the Fed and TARP bailouts (aka investments) ended up being profitable. There are a huge number of losers from 2008 which can’t be seen from a superficial surface view, instead it requires playing out an alternate reality where liquidations were forced, and that is a complex and difficult discussion. Paulson was a brilliant spin doctor and so successful that his fake stories of hundreds of thousands of jobs saved and ATMs that didn’t run out of money is being taken as real history, instead of the evil deceptive game it was to insure all his people continued to dominate global finance. It would take a long discussion to try and explain to you how profoundly unethical and manipulative were the actions they took and the effects those actions still have today in terms of extreme inequality, caused not by capitalism itself, but this crony capitalism.

Bitcoin was born from this reality and highly motivated by it. For a certain generation of finance technologists who had a close view of the inner workings of the system it was obviously rotten and corrupt to the core. The core being fiat.

If you are trying to pretend that by explaining M1 and M3 and the creation of money supply you claim somehow USD is “federated” and not centralized then in my opinion you don’t actually understand what you think you do.

Maybe read up on the Fed window and QE mechanisms and their balance sheet. USD is centralized with Fedwire, OCC, Treasury, Swift, BIS and all their regulatory operations, so they have very good information on most digital dollars in existence and certainly have incredible control over their creation and destruction.

Bitcoin is likely here to stay and in my personal experience most people who hate on it were once believers who bought high then sold low after one of its crashes. they now how a very bitter taste and have decided there is some fundamental flaw with it as an idea, mostly motivated by their own emotions and not logic. the other haters tend to have some deranged love of governments and see it correctly as a challenge to government power so attempt to discredit it, I feel mostly out of anxiety the government isn’t what they think it is and it scares them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maiden_Lane_Transactions




> On June 14, 2012, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York announced that its loans to Maiden Lane LLC (ML LLC) and Maiden Lane III LLC (ML III LLC) have been fully repaid with interest. Maiden Lane II LLC repaid its obligations of $19.4 billion on February 28, 2012.

Loans. Fully paid, with interest - the profits also went to Treasury. Also, they seem to have been a rounding error compared to the scale of the rest of the program, but you're right that the actions weren't exclusively Treasury. However, they were primarily Treasury.


Is it possible for TARP or ML to have actually lost money on those loans if the very same distressed assets the borrowing entities held were being simultaneously bought in the open market by the same Fed using QE?

Is not possible and all of it was a complicated shell game with analogies to money laundering. You have picked the wrong savior with central banks and are clearly drinking their Kool-Aid, roughly $8T of it.

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12147


> Is not possible.

That's a good opinion that isn't really relevant to the fact that in retrospect everything worked out great. What harm specifically are you seeking to point out?




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