SUPREME COURT RULES FED MUST RELEASE ALL BAILOUT DATA
by ilene - March 21st, 2011 9:44 pm
Courtesy of The Daily Bail
Video – 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.
Continue reading at Bloomberg…
Ah, The Game Is Afoot!
by ilene - August 27th, 2009 3:55 pm
Ah, The Game Is Afoot!
Courtesy of Karl Denninger at The Market Ticker
You knew it wouldn’t be that easy…..
Aug. 27 (Bloomberg) — The Federal Reserve argued yesterday that identifying the financial institutions that benefited from its emergency loans would harm the companies and render the central bank’s planned appeal of a court ruling moot.
"Harm the companies" eh? You mean reveal that they are and have been insolvent, and The Fed has been engaged in covering them up?
“What has the Fed got to hide?” said Senator Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who sponsored a bill to require the Fed to submit to an audit by the Government Accountability Office. “The time has come for the Fed to stop stonewalling and hand this information over to the public,” he said in an e-mail.
The Fed is hiding the insolvency of banks. They, along with their handmaidens in Congress (which is where you work Mr. Sanders) even went further and twisted the arm of FASB to legalize intentional accounting distortions that I argue amount to fraud.
The truth of what has been done keeps peeking around the corner in the form of bank failures and FDIC deposit insurance fund losses, with the latest charade being Colonial Bank that was carrying assets thirty seven percent above where its acquiring bank believes is a reasonable mark on the day prior to being taken over, and which in the FDIC’s last published release was considered "well-capitalized!"
These losses and the costs of this cover-up are being forcibly extracted from The American People literally at gunpoint through the issuance of hundreds of billions of Treasury Debt which we, our children and grandchildren will have to repay – a staggering total that the CBO and Obama Administration now admit will total nine trillion dollars over the next ten years.
“Experience in the banking industry has shown that when customers and market participants hear negative rumors about a bank, negative consequences inevitably flow,” Norman Nelson, vice president and general counsel for the group, said in the document.
Experience in the banking industry has shown that when you countenance false and inflated marks on assets losses inevitably flow (to the taxpayer) and the longer and more-involved the conspiracy to cover…