Showing posts with label political discussion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label political discussion. Show all posts

Thursday, December 4, 2008

Really Scary Fed Charts: NOV, US Bankrupt?

Fed Defies Transparency Aim in Refusal to Disclose (Update1): “The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in September they would comply with congressional demands for transparency in a $700 billion bailout of the banking system. Two months later, as the Fed lends far more than that in separate rescue programs that didn’t require approval by Congress, Americans have no idea where their money is going or what securities the banks are pledging in return.

“The collateral is not being adequately disclosed, and that’s a big problem,” said Dan Fuss, vice chairman of Boston- based Loomis Sayles & Co., where he co-manages $17 billion in bonds. “In a liquid market, this wouldn’t matter, but we’re not. The market is very nervous and very thin.”

Bloomberg News has requested details of the Fed lending under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act and filed a federal lawsuit Nov. 7 seeking to force disclosure.

The Fed made the loans under terms of 11 programs, eight of them created in the past 15 months, in the midst of the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression.”

While the Fed may be refusing to name individual firms, we can just look at the data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis to pin down exactly where the $2 trillion of emergency loans went. We can also determine how that in turn was deployed.[...]

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