[jklein11]

>Those banks, being private enterprise, are owned largely by the same class that owns everything else. If you own shares of the S&P 500 you own pieces of about ~two dozen banks. These are largely the banks that get treasury money which they then loan out at rates often fixed by the federal reserve in exchange for basically free money.

Do you have a source for this? It sounds like you might be refering to the discount window? My understanding is that banks rarely borrow money from the discount window. It is really to prevent a large scale liquidity crisis.

From what I understand the Fed has been printing money to make large scale asset purchases. They are essentially buying US bonds to keep the benchmark rate low. This means that the benchmark for interest rates stays low. More recently they have started taking on corporate bonds and equities.