Front Runners

(Via CJR)

Looks like the Fed finally coughed up some information about whose crap it's been buying all this time:

• Deutsche Bank (GER)- $290 billion
• Credit Suisse (SUI) - $287 billion 
• Morgan Stanley - $205 billion
• Goldman Sachs - $159 billion
• Citigroup - $185 billion
• Merrill Lynch/Bank of America - $174 billion
• JPMorgan Chase - $153 billion
• Barclays (UK) - $123 billion
• UBS (SUI) - $94 billion
• BNP Paribas (FRA) - $67 billion

For those of you keeping score at home - that's $1.7 trillion dollars, $861 billion of which is going to foreign banks.

The best bit:

It's not clear how much these firms profited by engaging in the kind of activity that allowed Gross to profit so well, known as "front running." However, it's abundantly clear that they did turn a profit.

Nice.

Free market, my ass.

(Also - isn't this kind of news dump two days early?)