For all the ink spilled on TARP — the bailout package authorizing the Treasury to purchase or insure up to $700 billion of “troubled assets” during the financial crisis — that program is dwarfed by another market intervention that occurred around the same time. In fact, the Government Accountability Office estimates that the Federal Reserve lent more than $16 trillion to financial firms between December 2007 and July 2010 — a figure that comes close to matching the entire, annual gross domestic product of the United States.
On Wednesday, Cato’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives hosted a two-part discussion of the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending power, and the legislative efforts underway to reform it. The first panel saw the Washington Post’s Ylan Mui interview Phillip Swagel, a former Treasury official turned University of Maryland professor, Marcus Stanley, the policy director at Americans for Financial Reform, and Mark Calabria, Cato’s own director of financial regulation studies. United States Senators Elizabeth Warren (D‑MA) and Richard Vitter (R‑LA) joined us for the second panel, during which they outlined their proposed “Bailout Prevention Act of 2015,” as well as their broader, bipartisan quest to end “too big to fail.”