Foreign banks and the Fed

I am surprised this has not really hit the U.S. headlines yet:

The biggest cumulative borrower from the Term Auction Facility was Barclays of the UK, which bought the US broker-dealer unit of Lehman Brothers out of bankruptcy in September 2008.

Barclays borrowed a cumulative $232bn from the TAF through various subsidiaries. The TAF provided one or three-month loans to banks from December 2007 until it closed this year.

…Bank of Scotland and RBS of the UK, Societe Generale of France, Dresdner Bank and Bayerische Landesbank of Germany, and Dexia of Belgium were all amongst the top 10 users of TAF. The second largest user was Bank of America, which bought Merrill Lynch during the financial crisis, and borrowed a cumulative $212bn.

The biggest seller of commercial paper to the Fed’s Commercial Paper Funding Facility, which bought up illiquid paper, was UBS of Switzerland followed by the insurer AIG. Five of the top 10 CPFF users were European banks.