Barclays was among banks that drew emergency loans from the US Federal Reserve during the financial crisis, documents released yesterday show.
At the height of the crisis, the Fed lent as much as $100 billion (£62 billion) through its discount window, which makes overnight loans to banks that are short of funds, including $1 billion to Barclays.
Several big US banks and scores of smaller ones also relied on the Fed for short-term loans, with Wachovia borrowing $6 billion and Morgan Stanley $1.25 billion in the autumn of 2008. Other borrowers included Bank of America and Citigroup and Goldman also used the facility.
The documents also show that Washington Mutual Bank took out $10 billion of short-term, mostly overnight loans in the week leading up to its collapse, the biggest banking failure in US history. One of the biggest loans was to Dexia, based in Paris and Brussels and the largest lender to local government in Belgium, which borrowed $31.5 billion through its New York branch on October 24 2008.
Most of the Fed’s lending during the crisis came through special crisis programmes. It published details of these in December. The information about discount window loans was published after Fox News, owned by News Corporation, parent company of The Times, and Bloomberg, pursued Freedom of Information requests with the Fed. The Fed had resisted, saying that naming borrowers using its discount window could lead to a run on the banks.