Supreme Court Rules Fed Must Release All Bailout Data

The Fed has 5 days to release all data.

March 21 (Bloomberg) -- The Federal Reserve must disclose details of emergency loans it made to banks in 2008, after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an industry appeal that aimed to shield the records from public view. The justices today left intact a court order that gives the Fed five days to release the records, sought by Bloomberg.

A huge win for transparency.

Statement from Matthew Winkler, editor in chief of Bloomberg News:

As a financial crisis developed in 2007, "The Federal Reserve forgot that it is the central bank for the people of the United States and not a private academy where decisions of great importance may be withheld from public scrutiny. The Fed must be accountable to Congress, especially in disclosing what it does with the people’s money."

“The board will fully comply with the court’s decision and is preparing to make the information available,” said David Skidmore, a spokesman for the Fed.

The order marks the first time a court has forced the Fed to reveal the names of banks that borrowed from its oldest lending program, the 98-year-old discount window. The disclosures, together with details of six bailout programs released by the central bank in December under a congressional mandate, would give taxpayers insight into the Fed’s unprecedented $3.5 trillion effort to stem the 2008 financial panic.

“I can’t recall that the Fed was ever sued and forced to release information” in its 98-year history, said Allan H. Meltzer, the author of three books on the U.S central bank and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

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QE2 Explained

"The Ben Bernank" is my new favorite phrase.

The Great Ressession Is Not Over

Bernanke Signals Stepped-Up Efforts to Spur Economy

The Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, gave his strongest indication yet that the central bank was ready to resume huge purchases of longer-term debt, and was
determined to prevent the economy from slipping into a cycle of falling prices.

While Mr. Bernanke emphasized that deflation was "not a significant risk for the United States at this time," he said the Fed "will strongly resist deviations from price stability in the downward direction." It was his most robust statement to date that the Fed would do its part to avoid a Japanese-style deflation from taking hold.

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Too late, Ben. Deflation and a decade of Japan's stagnant styled economy are here, and they're going to stay. Can't say the same for you, your boss or the morons in Congress who said they were going to come in and fix it. They wanted it, they got it. They threw a bunch of slush funds at it, took over a bunch of companies, continued to escalate foreign wars - and then decided to take over another 19% of the GDP with Obamacare. And they still haven't rolled up their sleeves to get the bad mortgages out of circulation - or dealt with Fredie or Fannie. Yeah, it's ALL Bush's fault. I didn't say Bush and his policies didn't build the kindling, but the Democrats are running around yelling fire - when they asked for, and are currently holding the garden hose. Don't kid yourself, they're just as much to blame for all this as everyone else, too. No one's getting out of here without some soot on their faces.

Start investing in ammo, gang. That is, while you can still get it.

House Democrats: We have no spine! Vote for us!

The Federal Reserve scored a political victory as Democrats mulling financial reform backed off measures that would expose monetary policy to audits and make the head of the New York Fed a political appointee.

The U.S. House of Representatives had approved a bill in December that included a provision, championed by Texas Representative Ron Paul, that would have opened the Fed's interest rate policy to congressional audits.

But on Tuesday, House Democrats participating in negotiations over a final financial reform bill, decided on a narrower Senate audit provision that does not cover monetary policy.

"Many politicians wanted to extract a pound of flesh from the Fed," said Eric Lascelles, chief economics and rates strategist at TD Securities. "That seems to be cooling off now."

The Fed, which has admitted it was too complacent about regulatory oversight in the run-up to the global financial crisis, has come under heavy fire for being too close to the banks it regulates.

The House Democrats also said they would try to defeat a plan contained in the Senate bill under debate that would allow the U.S. President to name the head of the New York Fed, a step that Fed officials have argued would undercut the central bank's political independence.

"It is disappointing to see both the removal of the provision about the president picking the New York Fed president and also the prohibition of bank employees serving as Fed presidents," said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "This would have been a big change toward taking away the banks' control over the Fed."

But, but ex-oil employees are always taking jobs as regulators and cabinet level positions, and look how well that's working out for everyone, right?

In other news, the sky is blue.

Audit the Fed, But With Watercolors

So the Senate voted overwhelmingly to adopt an amendment, authored by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT, opposed to those endless unemployment extensions), forcing a comprehensive review of the Federal Reserve's emergency lending activities. The amendment passed by a 96-0 vote.

Don't celebrate just yet.

Championed by Ron Paul since the seventies, it has faced extraordinary opposition from the White House, Wall Street and the Fed itself. Late last week, in a move that defused the opposition, and may have saved Wall Street reform legislation, Sanders agreed to limit the scope of the audit to emergency lending only, exempting other Fed activities.

Let me repeat that, an audit of the emergency lending only...

The House of Representatives adopted a similar provision--authored by Reps. Alan Grayson (D-FL) and Ron Paul (R-TX)--that would have required a comprehensive Fed audit. But though Grayson still supports a full audit, he applauded the steps that the Senate is taking in a statement last week. "There is deep bipartisan support for a full audit of the Federal Reserve, in both the House and the Senate," Grayson said. "The Sanders Amendment takes a significant step in that direction. I will work hard to help Dr. Paul and Senator Sanders to get a full Fed audit in the final bank reform bill. It is time for America to know what happened to our money."

Okay, if you really want to know - why water it down? Why not go for the jugular and do it - instead of this wet toilet paper approach?

Perhaps it's already way, way too late?

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."

~Thomas Jefferson