Federal Reserve, What Do You Have to Hide? 26 comments
an article to
-
Font Size:
-
Print
- TweetThis
Ding! Round one ends in the legal fight between Bloomberg, LP, and The Federal Reserve. The Columbia Journalism Review provides a summary, as does Bloomberg itself.
Some preliminaries:
- Here’s the original complaint.
- Here’s the amended and expanded complaint.
- Here’s a redacted version, showing the changes. (Please note I scanned two bitmap documents, and did OCR on them, and ran a document compare — there may be some errors here, but I did the best that I could.) The main expansion of the complaint is the inclusion of a request for documents related to the Bear Stearns rescue. It also clarifies that it is looking for loan records.
- Here’s the the Fed’s answer to the amended and expanded complaint.
The Fed’s basic response is that no documents exist for some of the requests, that it has turned over some documents, but is holding onto 231 documents for which they have an exemption under FOIA. They claim exemptions 4 and 5, which are (from Wikipedia):
- 4) trade secrets and commercial or financial information obtained from a person and privileged or confidential;
- 5) inter-agency or intra-agency memoranda or letters which would not be available by law to a party other than an agency in litigation with the agency;
This is just my take, and I could be wrong, but it seems to me that the Fed refuses to disclose on the grounds that the documents are sensitive since they contain confidential financial information, or, they involve inter- or intra-agency communication, such as with the Treasury, or inside the Fed itself. Point 5 seems to be a pretty broad exemption, but it remains to be proven whether the information is of such a nature that only an inter-agency suit could force divulging the data.
I repeat my five points from my last piece on why they might want to hide the information:
- The Fed is breaking its own rules, and lending on collateral that it publicly said that it wouldn’t lend against.
- They are playing favorites with institutions, and don’t want that to be revealed.
- The assets in question are technically in compliance with the rules of the Fed, but are worth far less than the amount loaned against them.
- Certain banks would be embarrassed by revealing what they own.
- It’s just a power game, and the Fed thinks it is above the law, particularly during a crisis (that it helped to cause).
As pointed out in the Bloomberg article above, there is a good possibility that they are trying to hide the amount that they have lost already. Also, as I have pointed out in my last piece on this topic, the insurance industry discloses everything with their assets, and it does not harm them. It would not hurt banks to do the same, and certainly if it is a matter of this one limited disclosure, the confidentiality of the banks would probably not be materially harmed.
So, Federal Reserve, what do you have to hide?
Related Articles
|
-
The Seeking Alpha 100
See allThe top 100 stock
market authors
selected for publication
Seeking Alpha 100 » -
Fastest Climbers
Authors with the largestSee all
increase in followers
in the last 7 days
Fastest Climbers » -
Top Commenters
Top commenters,See all
as ranked by their peers
Top Commenters » -
Top Instabloggers
The 100 most active
Instabloggers.-
1
David Fry
-
2
TraderMark
-
3
Don Dion
-
4
Cliff Wachtel
-
5
Mike Havrilla
Top Instabloggers » -
1
-
Top StockTalkers
Top
StockTalkers.-
1
David Fry
-
2
Cliff Wachtel
-
3
Mike Havrilla
-
4
David White
-
5
Hedged In
Top StockTalkers » -
1
In Liberty,
Louis
www.iamthewitness.com/...
Look at a list of the countries that don't have a Rothschild-controlled central bank, and you find that is the same list of countries currently having or threatened to have war waged upon it by the US. Coincidence?
On a related topic, when was our gold in Ft. Knox physically inventoried?
But my guess is that federal reserve employees are federal employees and at least the chairman and members of the board of governors who are not there by virtue of being presidents of regional banks are appointed by federal officials.
The mandate of the federal reserve is regulatory and that is a function of government. If the mandate of the federal reserve were to promote the interest of banks, then the argument that it is not part of government would hold more water.
Here is one opinion that allowing Lehman Brothers to go bankrupt not a mistake. The failure of Lehman Brothers alerted the global financial community of the nature and the severity of the problem at a time when it was (hopefully) still manageable. If the fraud being perpetrated on the world by the financial community had been allowed to continue indefinitely, the consequences could only have been worse, perhaps even catastrophic.
These are, of course, only the opinions of an amateur observer and participant in the financial markets. I am not leveraged, conservatively invested and down 30% for the year which is a lot better than many of the newly minted millionaires in the financial world.
In most restaurants where proud chefs prepare great food, patrons are welcome to enter the kitchen and thank the chef. Where such openness is practiced, customers get the chance to learn a lot about the nature of the restaurant, especially its cleanliness.
But in a few so-called excellent restaurants, however, patrons are kept out of the kitchen with explanations like: “You will be in the way “, “It is too busy in there”, or “Our insurance does not allow it”. This makes it easy for the customer to imagine that the restaurant is hiding something: a dirty kitchen, frozen food reheated in the microwave or underage staff, perhaps.
Openness and secrecy are opposites. Openness exposes fraud and deceit: the less open, the more room for dishonesty. An excellent restaurant can survive without letting customers see its kitchen. But a similar restaurant that is open will do much better.
Thus a closed, secretive business is not automatically dishonest, but keeping your honesty secret is self-defeating.
The Federal Reserve may be about to learn that the hard way, for the new technology of the Internet–blogs like this–is revolutionizing the way organizations are going to have to communicate with their stakeholders.
We need to TakeBackTheFed.com
The American people are being robbed and are too stupid to realize it.
The bankers "campaign contributions" keep enough of our Representatives on THEIR payroll that they have been able to call most of the shots since 1789 and ALL of the shots since the Panic of 1907 and the birth of the Fed in 1913. The only way that is going to change is with a political party that eschews corporate (bank) campaign financing. Obviously that will be neither the Democrats nor the Republicans.
The human body is able to create all the blood it needs (without taking on any debt) by draining off an equivalent amount of "liquidity"; there's absolutely no reason we couldn't do the same thing with our currency (by replacing all income-based taxes with a small and automatically-collecte... "infrastructure maintenance fee" charged on every electronic transfer of funds).
And if all new currency was put into circulation via equi-dollar distributions to every legal US resident, we certainly wouldn't be worrying about the coming GREATER Depression. (The 800 billion dollar bailout alone would put almost $2700 into the hands of every legal US resident, and the money would all end up in the banks - some after being used to purchase US-manufactured automobiles - anyway.)
Don't take my word for it ... see for yourself:
www.youtube.com/watch?...
Or Google the phrase "greenspan above the law" and view YouTube clip.
The FED is the cause of every boom-bust cycle since 1913.
The FED is a legalized counterfeiting operation.
The FED is the fulfillment of 1 of the 10 planks presented in Karl Marx's "Communist Manifesto."
Wake up.
On Dec 13 01:27 AM happysoul77777 wrote:
> Give them a break! They screwed up by letting Lehman go bankrupt.
> Now, the whole world is paying the price. The Fed is trying everything
> they can to fix this meltdown. You don't want a 1929-style depression,
> do you?
Its too late now to stop the equalisation. What US wages will buy will go down and down as Chinese and Indian wages buy more. There are only two answers to this. War or a global economy with a global currency in which all men (and nations) are equal so lon as they work equally hard.
I think we need the truth if we really want to clean this mess up and fix it instead of pretending its not that bad and trying to continue on our merry little way. Why hide the corruption and problems to try and perpetuate a flawed and corrupt system?
On Dec 13 02:42 PM k9s-4-k8 wrote:
> Its easy to cast stones when you don't really know squat. Surely,
> this Fed didn't start this crisis but they have made errors. Letting
> Lehman go bk was probably one of the biggest errors. As for the issue
> of transparency one needs to understand what financial firms already
> understand. Our financial system is incredibly dependent on trust.
> Now right away I know the knee jerk reaction is how can I trust when
> they aren't transparent. Yes, that is a good point, however it only
> makes practical sense when to know won't potentially undo that which
> you're trying to fix. How much havoc could a roomful of reporters
> do to trust in our financial system if it makes for a good, shocking
> story. How many ways are there to look at one piece of data without
> understanding the bigger picture? Could anything be used and misused
> to such an extent as to misrepresent whether purposely or not, just
> to produce an exciting headline? How much time will it take to explain
> anything and everything while the marketplace is negatively impacted
> by misunderstanding? Even if we understand everything the Fed releases,
> might serious harm come to the trust of the financial system itself?
> Who has all the answers?