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Well, it's official -- The Fed saved the economy back in the fall of 2008:

The Federal Reserve, under orders from Congress, today named the counterparties of about 21,000 transactions from $3.3 trillion in aid provided to stem the worst financial panic since the Great Depression.

Bank of America Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co. were among the biggest borrowers from one program, the Term Auction Facility, with as much as $45 billion apiece.

"We owe an accounting to the American people of who we have lent money to," Richmond Fed President Jeffrey Lacker said today in an interview. "It is a good step toward broader transparency."

The data detail the breadth of central bank support that reached beyond banks to companies such as General Electric Co., which accessed a Fed program 12 times for a total of $16 billion in commercial paper. The Fed bought short-term IOUs from corporations, risky assets from Bear Stearns and more than $1 trillion in U.S. housing debt.

Companies' participation in the programs "reflected the severe market disruptions during the financial crisis and generally did not reflect participants' financial weakness," the Fed said today in a statement in Washington. "The Federal Reserve followed sound risk-management practices in administering all of these programs" and incurred no credit losses, the statement said.

The New York Times has more:

The market had been under pressure since Sept. 15, when Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and defaulted on a substantial amount of its own short-term notes. The pressure became panic on Sept. 16, 2008, when the Reserve Fund, one of the nation's largest money market funds, "broke the buck" by reporting a share price below a dollar. Within days, the Fed set up an emergency insurance program for money market mutual funds, which helped slow the tidal wave of withdrawals.

But because money market funds were the principal buyers of commercial paper, the crisis spread quickly to that market as well. Within two weeks, the Fed set up a lending facility and started buying commercial paper on Oct. 27, 2008.

But did the healthiest or weakest entities get access to these lines of credit?

The program was not aimed at rescuing the least creditworthy borrowers, who remained frozen out of the market, but was intended to buy only the best quality commercial paper. The common wisdom was that its primary beneficiaries would be the top-tier banks, insurers and financial institutions who would normally could have sold their notes without difficulty.

In the first week of the program, the Fed bought more than $225 billion in commercial paper. And the new data confirms that those companies -- ranging from Ohio's First Third Bank to the best-known bank franchises of Europe and Asia, such as Commerzbank and Sumitomo -- were the primary occupants of the new lifeboat, along with the finance arms of the nation's hard-pressed auto industry.

But in line with them that week were McDonalds, Caterpillar, General Electric, Harley-Davidson, Verizon and Baxter International, the health-care industry giant -- major companies that were not generally considered vulnerable to the market meltdown.

According to The Fed, all of the lending has been paid back incurring little to no losses to taxpayers:

"The Federal Reserve followed sound risk-management practices in administering all of these programs, incurred no credit losses on programs that have been wound down, and expects to incur no credit losses on the few remaining programs," the central bank said in a statement.

The Fed emphasized Wednesday that the institutions that used the loan programs did not necessarily have any underlying problems beyond the liquidity crunch that became widespread in 2008. With the economy still so fragile, some Fed officials have expressed concern that the release of so much data might roil the markets.

Well, the market rallied the most in the past 6 months, with the DOW rising almost 250 points. It sure seems that the markets weren't bothered by this information at all!

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