Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Photo of the Trading Floor at the New York Fed
Having defeated the Crown in a bloody revolution some two centuries ago, Americans don’t like living under a patriarchy, oligarchy or kleptocracy. Unfortunately, the U.S. central bank, the Federal Reserve, is a little of all three.
On Monday of this week, the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York stated in a speech that “the Federal Reserve already is very transparent and accountable to Congress and to the public.” Two days later, Wall Street On Parade attempted to get one piece of very basic information from the Fed and got the royal runaround. We wanted to know if JPMorgan Chase, a bank operating under a deferred prosecution agreement for two felony counts and under a criminal investigation for potential currency rigging, was still the custodian of $1.7 trillion of mortgage backed securities owned by the Federal Reserve, as we had reported on November 3, 2014.
Other basic information from the Fed is also off limits to the press. Each day the President of the United States posts his daily schedule on the internet. Trying to find out whom the Chairman of the Federal Reserve has met with is far more secretive. In 2006, Greg Ip wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the Federal Reserve refused to provide the schedule of Alan Greenspan, the former Fed Chairman, for his last seven months in office on the basis that “his personal calendar wasn’t an agency record and, therefore, according to court interpretations, not subject to the FOIA.”
The Fed Chairman that followed Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, stated that one of his priorities was to “make the Federal Reserve more transparent.” In December of 2013, when we asked the communications office of the Fed for Bernanke’s 2007 and 2008 appointment calendar, we were told we would have to file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for it – a nuisance stalling tactic for something so basic.
When we finally received the appointment calendar, there were redactions of 84 meetings that occurred between January 1, 2007 and the pivotal collapse of Bear Stearns on the weekend of March 15-16, 2008. Bernanke’s calendar for March 7, 2008 shows a full day of appointments blacked out. On Saturday, March 8, Bernanke had an anonymous conference call with unnamed parties. At 11 a.m. the following Monday, March 10, he held a meeting in his office from 11 a.m. to 12 noon but whom he met with is blacked out.
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