Goldman Sachs Emergency Fed Loans Topped $24 Billion in Crisis

Bloomberg Businessweek reports:

Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which rebounded from the financial crisis to post record profit last year, was a regular borrower from two emergency Federal Reserve programs in 2008 and early 2009, new data show.

The firm borrowed from the Fed’s Term Securities Lending Facility most weeks from March 2008 through April 2009, data released by the Fed today show. Two units of the New York-based firm borrowed as much as $24.2 billion from the Fed’s Primary Dealer Credit Facility in the weeks after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s bankruptcy in September 2008, the data show.

Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein, 56, was quoted by Vanity Fair last year as saying the company might have survived the credit crisis without government help. The firm’s president, Gary Cohn, was more definitive, according to the magazine: “I think we would not have failed,” he was quoted as saying. “We had cash.”

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York during 2008 and 2009, has disputed such an assessment.

Goldman Sachs: friend and beneficiary of central banking.