The most publicized bailout of the financial crisis was the TARP bill that provided capital injections to a wide range of banks. But most of the assistance to financial firms was provided through a less publicized set of emergency lending programs authorized by Section 13–3 of the Federal Reserve Act. This emergency lending authority supported the Fed’s rescue of AIG, a massive set of guarantees for Citibank, which would have failed without them, and an alphabet soup of lending ‘facilities’ that supported a small set of Wall Street dealers with almost unlimited cheap credit for a period of years.

When Congress examined this issue during the Dodd-Frank Act, they placed new limits on emergency lending that are contained in Section 1101 of the legislation. These limits are clearly intended to limit 13–3 lending to programs that are truly broad based (as opposed to bailing out a small set of insider Wall Street institutions) and to exclude the use of the program for bailouts of institutions that are actually insolvent. Join us as we discuss whether Dodd-Frank’s limitations to the Fed’s 13–3 powers went too far, or not far enough.