Federal Judge Loretta Preska has stayed her order for the Federal Reserve to release information on the emergency loans that it made:

The U.S. Federal Reserve won a delay of a federal judge’s order that it reveal the names of the banks that have participated in its emergency lending programs and the sums they received.

Chief Judge Loretta Preska of the U.S. District Court in Manhattan stayed her August 24 order in favor of Bloomberg News, which had sought the information under the federal Freedom of Information Act, so that the central bank could appeal.

The Fed asked for the stay claiming that releasing the information would cause grave damage to the financial system, but that was also their argument for not complying with Bloomberg News’ Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in the 1st place, so what is really going on here is a pretty standard stay pending appeal.

I fully expect this to go all the way to the Supreme Court, and if this information gets released, I fully expect it to reveal that the Federal Reserve has been lying, as their standard behavior has been to assume that you can’t handle the truth, so the truth must be suppressed.

As I have said before, this is why central banks powers need to be limited: While the interest rate/inflation fighting function must be thoroughly insulated from politics, because the act of taking away the proverbial punch bowl is inherently politically suicidal, any other function that does not require that level of political isolation must be vested in a more accountable institution.

Background here.