Don’t Audit the Fed

Waterboard their lily white flabby asses until they release the data that they are required to!

Even though the (weak tea) Dodd-Frank financial reform bill requires the Federal Reserve to release data on the collateral that they received for loans during the crises, the “sh%$pile for cash” program, so that people can see the risks that they took, the Fed is withholding this data:

The Federal Reserve withheld details on individual securities pledged as collateral by recipients of $885 billion in central bank loans, denying taxpayers a measure of the risks they faced from its emergency aid.

The central bank yesterday released data on 21,000 transactions from $3.3 trillion in emergency lending to stem the financial crisis. July’s Dodd-Frank law required the Fed to disclose the names of borrowers, the size and interest rates of loans, and “information identifying the types and amounts of collateral pledged or assets transferred.”

What is going on here is that the Fed is trying to cover its ass, and the only question is whether what they did was merely myopic, or actually illegal.

My money is on the latter.

H/t Yves Smith.

Leave a Reply