The Fed turns a healthy profit in 2010

The Marketplace Daily Pulse is beating faster today thanks to all the profit raining down from American’s central banking system, the Federal Reserve.

Dan Gross, at Yahoo Finance, tracked down the amount of profit the Fed earned last year. The Fed earns profit by charging interest and fees when it lends to banks, and then dumps that profit back into the United States Treasury on my behalf and yours.

In 2010, it hit $78.4 billion. That’s more than double the profit it generated in 2007, the year before the financial crisis.

The chart above, available as a download the PDF from the Federal Reserve website, shows how much the Fed gives back every year over the last decade.

Meanwhile, today’s the three-year anniversary of TARP – that massive and controversial bailout the Fed set up to prop up troubled banks. But the Fed, is doing just fine, thank you very much.