$1.2 Trillion in Secret Loans For Wall Street

[Bloomberg] The $1.2 trillion peak on Dec. 5, 2008 -- the combined outstanding balance under the seven programs tallied by Bloomberg -- was almost three times the size of the U.S. federal budget deficit that year and more than the total earnings of all federally insured banks in the U.S. for the decade through 2010, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

[Bloomberg] "Whether banks needed the Fed’s money for survival or used it because it offered advantageous rates, the central bank’s lender-of-last-resort role amounts to a free insurance policy for banks guaranteeing the arrival of funds in a disaster", said Richard Herring, a finance professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia who has studied financial crises.

Basically, TAF loans allowed banks to continue borrowing money from the Federal Reserve at a rate of 1.1% for years after TARP officially ended ... as a means for banks to gorge on tax payer funds out of the public eye. 

Please read the details of the TAF program here