They say they stopped the economy from collapsing. They say they kept people working. They say they saved us.

OK - fine. I'll bite. So why give tens of billions of dollars to foreign banks?

The financial crisis stretched even farther across the economy than many had realized, as new disclosures show the Federal Reserve rushed trillions of dollars in emergency aid not just to Wall Street but also to motorcycle makers, telecom firms and foreign-owned banks in 2008 and 2009.

The Fed's efforts to prop up the financial sector reached across a broad spectrum of the economy, benefiting stalwarts of American industry including General Electric and Caterpillar and household-name companies such as Verizon, Harley-Davidson and Toyota. The central bank's aid programs also supported U.S. subsidiaries of banks based in East Asia, Europe and Canada while rescuing money-market mutual funds held by millions of Americans.

The biggest users of the Fed lending programs were some of the world's largest banks, including Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Swiss-based UBS and Britain's Barclays, according to more than 21,000 loan records released Wednesday under new financial regulatory legislation.

The data reveal banks turning to the Fed for help almost daily in the fall of 2008 as the central bank lowered lending standards and extended relief to all kinds of institutions it had never assisted before.

Individuals got cash too - as long as you operated a big hedge fund. A Wall Street address was very helpful also, and if a corporation spent a lot on TV advertising so that everybody had heard of them, they got the bailout too.

Did the Fed save us from depression? We'll never know, will we? I guess we're just going to have to take their word for it - for now. What we know is that money was almost free and easy to get at that time - even if your address did not include "USA."