democracia participativa y derechos humanos / participatory democracy & human rights

The Huffington Post reported recently Bloomberg’s most comprehensive version to date of its data on Federal Reserve emergency lending. The Fed made some 50,000 transactions for a total of $1.2 trillion in loans to banks and financial institutions.  But Bloomberg did not have it easy.  In order to find out which institutions got loans under two of the seven lending programs, it was forced to file Freedom of Information Act requests. The Fed did not disclose the data until Bloomberg LP filed suit against the Fed, and the suit almost made it to the Supreme Court!  The Clearing House Association, representing some of the biggest commercial banks in the U.S., argued that making public the information would undermine investor confidence in the banks and warned that these banks would now be less likely to try to get emergency assistance in the event of a future crisis.  But Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, was adamant: “This is public money,” he said. “The public has every reason in the world to know where it went.  The fact that these institutions benefited enormously… you can really dispute,” Baker added.  In fact, according to an earlier Bloomberg report, even after paying off interest, these banks made around $13 million as a result of receiving Fed loans.

Bloomberg releases most Detailed Description yet of Federal Reserve Emergency Loans

Washington, D.C., Dec.23.─ Add up the emergency loans the Federal Reserve distributed to banks between 2007 and 2009 -- when the American economy lurched closer to collapse than anyone had previously thought possible -- and it's an impressive picture.

On Friday, Bloomberg News made available the fullest version yet of its data on Fed emergency lending, a subject the news organization has written about numerous times in the past year. The Bloomberg release includes records of about 50,000 transactions the Fed made through seven different financial mechanisms.

At their peak, these seven programs represented $1.2 trillion in loans to banks and financial institutions -- the high-water mark of a massive, systemic bailout whose details the country's central banking authority has not always seemed eager to divulge.

Much of the information included in Friday's release has been previously reported in Bloomberg coverage, but this week marked the first time that funds from the seven programs have been presented as a series of daily loans to 407 individual banks.

"There were reasons for doing it. There are always reasons for doing it," said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, referring to the Fed's lending to troubled banks at a moment when the country's entire financial architecture seemed to be in jeopardy.

At the same time, Baker said, transparency is important in matters like this.

"This is public money," Baker told The Huffington Post. "The public has every reason in the world to know where it went." …

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