The Fed loaned a cumulative total of $162.9 billion from its MMLF in March and April of 2020 with 72% of that total going to just six mutual fund families: Federated $27.75 billion; JPMorgan $24.8 billion; Morgan Stanley $19.55 billion; UBS $17.3 billion; Wells Fargo $15.5 billion; and BlackRock $11.98 billion. The Fed is supposed to be the lender of last resort to commercial banks in the US – banks that make loans to businesses and consumers to keep the US economy running – not the lender of last resort to the trading houses on Wall Street. BlackRock, while it was borrowing $11.98 billion from The Fed's MMFL, was also directing the Federal Reserve to bail out its own BlackRock Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs).

For the past week, Wall Street On Parade has been crunching the cryptic data released by the Federal Reserve on March 31 that named the mutual funds that couldn't meet redemption requests in their money market funds in March and April of 2020 without tapping loans from the Fed.

As we reported yesterday, the Fed loaned a cumulative total of $162.9 billion from its Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (MMLF) in March and April of 2020 with 72 percent of that total going to just six mutual fund families: Federated $27.75 billion; JPMorgan $24.8 billion; Morgan Stanley $19.55 billion; UBS $17.3 billion; Wells Fargo $15.5 billion; and BlackRock $11.98 billion.

There are two striking aspects to this story. First, no mainstream media outlet will go near the story. The same media outlets that battled the Fed in court for more than two years to name the Wall Street firms and how much they borrowed from the Fed after the 2008 financial crash are refusing to report on the second largest Fed bailout in U.S. history. That bailout includes not just loans made by the MMLF but by over a dozen other Fed bailout facilities created in 2019 and 2020.