Here Comes THE JUDGE!

BOOYA!

Aug. 24 (Bloomberg) — The Federal Reserve must make public reports about recipients of emergency loans from U.S. taxpayers under programs created to address the financial crisis, a federal judge ruled.

Stick THAT in your pipe and smoke it Bernanke!

What our CONgress refuses to do the judiciary comes through with!  Transparency – one way or another.

The ruling can be found here (PDF, thanks Zerohedge!) and is important in a number of ways:

1. It destroys any attempt to claim that identity of a borrower from The Fed’s programs is "proprietary" or "generated" by the borrower (a "person") since the data is in fact generated by The Federal Reserve system itself.  Bravo for the judge seeing through the attempted BS.
2. It calls out The Fed for intentionally not searching potentially-responsive documents.  Bad move Bernanke.  Rulings citing apparent bad faith are rare in cases such as this. 
3. It (properly, IMHO) dismisses arguments of "stigma" due to nothing more than a speculative assertion.  This was Bernanke’s claim during Congressional testimony as well when he refused to provide the information to Congress; we now have a judicial ruling saying that that argument is BS.

The only bad news is that coming from the district court it is not binding precedent, but if The Fed attempts to appeal it and loses it will become so – and a quick perusal of the opinion shows little meat for The Fed to attempt an appeal upon.

This should result in the public disclosure both here and forward of borrowers and terms under The Fed’s facilities. 

It should also result in an immediate demand from Congress for all of this data as well to be provided on a public basis, both for current programs and on an ongoing, forward basis, since there is now a judicial ruling that these records are NOT exempt from disclosure.

Now if we can just get all this fraudulent accounting and violations of prompt corrective action in front of a Judge…..

PS: Ben, here’s my gift of the day to you: