Sixteen trillion here, fifteen trillion there, soon you're talking real money

Google for "sixteen trillion" and you come up with some scary stuff:

Bernanke Secretly Gives away Sixteen Trillion (Ahead of the Heard);
US$ 16000000000000.00 (sixteen trillion) bailout (Pravda Forum);
Bernanke Secretly Gives away Sixteen Trillion Dollars (News Goldseek.com);
FED doles out sixteen trillion in bailouts that banks don't have to repay (trulia.com);
The Sixteen-Trillion-Dollar Mistake (cup.columbia.edu);

and many, many similar stories, although none, it seems, from the mainstream media.

Then comes this speech in the British upper house by Lord James Blackheath, a man of supposedly wide experience of banking and finance, in which the speaker claims to possess documents indicating that the US Fed was a participant in a fraud involving the transfer of $15 trillion dollars from an Indonesian potentate to the Royal Bank of Scotland.



Wow. Beeeeezaaaaaaarrrrre.

However, on the Blackheath claim, at least, we can probably set our minds at rest, for according to Andy McSmith at the Independent the noble lord himself appears to have been taken in by a Nigerian-letter-type scam.

David James was a City businessman commissioned by the Tories, in opposition, to report on ways of eliminating government waste. Last week, the 74-year-old peer was exercised about a story he has picked up that $15trn – that is $15,000,000,000,000 – belonging to "the richest man in the world", Yohannes Riyadi, was deposited in 2009 in the Royal Bank of Scotland. Lord James said he remains baffled after a two-year pursuit of the story, but has all the information on a memory stick, which he is offering to hand over to the Government.

His documents include a letter from the Bank of Indonesia telling him the whole story is a "complete fabrication". He took his concerns to the Treasury minister, Lord Sassoon, who said: "This is rubbish. It is far too much money. It'd stick out like a sore thumb and you can't see it in the RBS accounts."

And an alert Financial Times blogger said that had Lord James googled "Yohannes Riyadi", the first item to come up would be a warning from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York that the name is part of an internet scam designed to get money from the gullible. Two agents are trying to trace who is behind it. Perhaps Lord James should offer his memory stick.

But what of Bernanke's "secret," "not-to-be-repayed" "give away" to those undeserving banksters?

Thanks to an amendment by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Wall Street reform law passed in July 2010 directed the Government Accountability Office to conduct "the first top-to-bottom audit of the Federal Reserve."

"As a result of this audit, we now know that the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world," said Sanders. "This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you're-on-your-own individualism for everyone else."

But what we also know from Page 137 of the Government Accountability Office report is that by last summer, every cent of the $16 trillion had been repaid. 

So perhaps what is most puzzling about the $sixteen trillion is that the US Fed does not do more to publicize the success of an operation that seems to have cost the US taxpayer nothing, while possibly saving the World from a total banking system collapse.