Even more damning details of the so-called rescue by the Fed were buried in a little-read GAO report. During the crisis, the Fed was printing conflict-of-interest waivers almost as fast as it printed money, precisely because many of the identities of the rescued and the saviors were essentially identical. For instance, the New York Fed president William Dudley was issued waivers to keep his AIG and GE investments all the while he was bailing out those firms. But beyond such garden-variety double-dealing, the Fed followed good neoliberal precepts by outsourcing most of its emergency lending programs to private contractors such as JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo in the form of no-bid contracts. These favored firms then turned around and were lavishly supported by the Fed with near-zero interest rate loans.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 510