Court Orders Fed to Disclose Emergency Bank Loans

[Jerome]

Terms of Service

The Federal Reserve must for the first time identify the companies in its emergency lending programs after losing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

The Fed has refused to name the financial firms it lent to or disclose the amounts or the assets put up as collateral under 11 programs

I bet the collateral is your lifetime labor.

[D. Scarlatti]

You'll never know. Collateral is not detailed in the term reports.

[Stephen Maturin]

Bloomberg L.P. v. Board of Governors (pdf, 47 pages). Ripping good stuff, at least if you don't mind navigating an ocean of admin law crapola.

A different judge of the same court went the other way last month in a FOIA lawsuit filed by Fox News. Fox News Network, LLC v. Board of Governors (pdf, 28 pages). This issue's on its way to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

[chunksmediocrites]

Following up on that lawsuit from Bloomberg:
Secret Fed Loans Helped Banks Net $13 Billion

The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.

The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.

A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.

This is pretty damning stuff. Massive secret loans to prop up banks that were holding the economy hostage due to sheer size, and the end result? These banks are even bigger, and came out of it making a huge profit. Crony capitalism FTW!

The size of the bailout came to light after Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News, won a court case against the Fed and a group of the biggest U.S. banks called Clearing House Association LLC to force lending details into the open.

The Fed, headed by Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, argued that revealing borrower details would create a stigma -- investors and counterparties would shun firms that used the central bank as lender of last resort -- and that needy institutions would be reluctant to borrow in the next crisis. Clearing House Association fought Bloomberg’s lawsuit up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the banks’ appeal in March 2011.

Well let's see, how much money did the Fed lend these banks secretly?

The amount of money the central bank parceled out was surprising even to Gary H. Stern, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 1985 to 2009, who says he “wasn’t aware of the magnitude.” It dwarfed the Treasury Department’s better-known $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.

I think the technical term for that is HOLY SHIT.

Surely stockholders knew the condition of the banks they ostensibly owned, right?

Bankers didn’t disclose the extent of their borrowing. On Nov. 26, 2008, then-Bank of America (BAC) Corp. Chief Executive Officer Kenneth D. Lewis wrote to shareholders that he headed “one of the strongest and most stable major banks in the world.” He didn’t say that his Charlotte, North Carolina-based firm owed the central bank $86 billion that day.

Well, that's just one bad apple, amirite?

JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon told shareholders in a March 26, 2010, letter that his bank used the Fed’s Term Auction Facility “at the request of the Federal Reserve to help motivate others to use the system.” He didn’t say that the New York-based bank’s total TAF borrowings were almost twice its cash holdings or that its peak borrowing of $48 billion on Feb. 26, 2009, came more than a year after the program’s creation.

Wow. Well at least the Treasury Department knew hat was goin on when it handed out TARP funds, right?

The Treasury Department relied on the recommendations of the Fed to decide which banks were healthy enough to get TARP money and how much, the former officials say. The six biggest U.S. banks, which received $160 billion of TARP funds, borrowed as much as $460 billion from the Fed, measured by peak daily debt calculated by Bloomberg using data obtained from the central bank.

Bernanke in an April 2009 speech said that the Fed provided emergency loans only to “sound institutions,” even though its internal assessments described at least one of the biggest borrowers, Citigroup, as “marginal.”

On Jan. 14, 2009, six days before the company’s central bank loans peaked, the New York Fed gave CEO Vikram Pandit a report declaring Citigroup’s financial strength to be “superficial,” bolstered largely by its $45 billion of Treasury funds. The document was released in early 2011 by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, a panel empowered by Congress to probe the causes of the crisis.

Uh, okay, so the T-Men didn't know what was going on. But surely Congress had some oversight?

Lawmakers knew none of this.

They had no clue that one bank, New York-based Morgan Stanley (MS), took $107 billion in Fed loans in September 2008, enough to pay off one-tenth of the country’s delinquent mortgages. The firm’s peak borrowing occurred the same day Congress rejected the proposed TARP bill, triggering the biggest point drop ever in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. (INDU) The bill later passed, and Morgan Stanley got $10 billion of TARP funds, though Paulson said only “healthy institutions” were eligible.

Hey, I bet those mega-banks have learned their lesson, having such a dire crisis with stern consequences for their industry.

Total assets held by the six biggest U.S. banks increased 39 percent to $9.5 trillion on Sept. 30, 2011, from $6.8 trillion on the same day in 2006, according to Fed data.

[Jerome]

Keep voting for more government power.

[Waluigi]

It would be interesting to replay the 2008 financial crisis in the absence of an aggressive Fed, just to see how it would turn out.

[SR71]

Aw chunksmediocrites, you are just blowing me away, AGAIN! Awesome commentary. The punchline is the Teatards think the .gov FORCED the banks to take the funds. HA FUCKING HA HA HAH!

[Jerome]

People are so stuck in the false dichotomy, it is rather sad.

[SR71]

Except that it's not a false dichotomy. If you mean that our political representatives are just variations on the same theme, you are partially correct. If you mean that the populace have baseless significant philosophical differences and interests, there is no false dichotomy. It is a real and extant dichotomy.

[Jerome]

No, the Corporation vs Government dichotomy, this is what is false.

[Adam]

Seven medium sized governments ITT.

[Crumb]

So you are part of the problem.

[Crumb]

[Jerome]

One has to play by the rules government makes.

[Angakuk]

Don't you mean that one has to play by the rules the corporations make?

[Jerome]

Originally Posted by Angakuk

Don't you mean that one has to play by the rules the corporations make?

No, the rules are written by government, voted for by you.

[Angakuk]

A government owned and operated by the corporations. Isn't that what you meant when when you claimed that the Government vs Corporations was a false dichotomy?