The Federal Reserve provided as much as $1.2 trillion in public money to banks and other companies from August 2007 through April 2010 to head off a depression, according to a Bloomberg report.

Bloomberg said that Morgan Stanley, along with Citigroup and Bank of America were the biggest borrowers under seven Fed emergency lending programs. The three banks’ combined $298.2 billion in hidden Fed loans was triple what they received in publicly disclosed bailouts from the U.S. Treasury.

Bloomberg noted that by 2008, the housing market’s collapse forced those companies to take more than six times as much, $669 billion, in emergency loans from the U.S. Federal Reserve. The loans dwarfed the $160 billion in public bailouts the top 10 got from the U.S. Treasury, yet until now the full amounts have remained secret.

Editor’s note: The eerie similarity between the excesses of the privileged class contrasted with economic turmoil and uprisings during pre-French revolutionary times didn’t escape us. Recently, citizens have taken to the streets to occupy the financial districts and other venues from New York to San Francisco. Will heads continue to roll? Only in the figurative sense, it seems.